Mailbox Blues sweeps the state
 
By Henry Nichols -  Special to Nashville247.tv/
 
 
Neighborhood mailboxes are going the way of the buffalo, the glass milk bottle and the phone booth. They’re slowly vanishing. 
 
Without any fanfare, the U.S. Postal Service has removed 46 of Nashville’s blue mailboxes in the past year. There are 239 left in the city, and fewer than 3,500 in the entire state.
 
The move appears be a growing trend around the country in the midst of a deepening recession. The Postal Service is cutting back and applying efficiency standards.  There are now density tests for mailboxes.
 
“If there are 25 pieces of mail or less in a given mailbox, it costs the Postal Service money in fuel and time for us to drive to that mailbox and collect the small amount of mail,” Beth Barnett, the USPS Communications Manager for the Tennessee District said. “Removing the box is simply good business sense in that respect.”
 
Traffic at the neighborhood blue mailbox is evaporating for several reasons. More people are using e-mail and text messaging instead of sending letters.  Consumers are paying their bills online.  Plus there’s robust competition from UPS and FedEx.  According to Barnett, the volume of single-piece First-Class Mail has declined to a level not seen since 1964.
The national numbers really tell the story. There were 365,000 mailboxes across the country in the year 2000. Today half of them are gone.  The number is down to 187,200 as of March 17. 
 
“If they are not being used then we remove the box,” Barnett said.
 
What may be the real issue, however, is the Postal Service seems to do little in the way of communicating its cost-saving measures to the public.  In late April, Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) wrote a letter to Postmaster General John E. Potter asking why so many mailboxes had been removed around L.A. According to the Los Angeles Times, Waxman got an “unprecedented number of complaints” that mailboxes were disappearing without warning. 
 
A Web site that once tracked the disappearance of phone booths is now tracking the demise of mailboxes. There are postings from California, Pennsylvania, New York, Minneapolis, Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin and Missouri.
 
Music City is no different, as many traditional post office customers who’d like to send personal mail or greeting cards have to figure out for themselves where their familiar drop-spots have gone.
 
“Actually, I haven’t really thought about it, but it’s hard to find a mailbox”, Green Hills resident Sarah Hart said.
 
To mail a letter you can still stop by the local post office. If you need to find a mailbox, the Postal Service will point you to the closest one. But in a move that speaks volumes about changing times, the information is online at the Post Office Web site.
 
Links:
Locate a mailbox:   http://usps.whitepages.com/collection_box/search. 
Buy stamps, order boxes, look up zip codes, schedule a pickup: http://www.usps.com/
See what people are saying across the country:   http://www.payphone-project.com/mailboxes/