And their business is to deliver stuff.

Every year, my wife buys a couple of books of Christmas stamps.

The religious kind. For Christmas cards, but also enough to basically last through the year.

So this, I dutifully went to the post office to get them for her. We’ve found from experience that buying them online is what we can charitably call unreliable.

And I get to the window, and tell the clerk there that I needed a couple of books of religious stamps. Faster than a dog eating a pork chop, she points to the selection, and told me they don’t have the religious stamps. “We never got them in,” she continued. “People have been asking for them since October. But they never came in.”

Let’s ponder this a moment.

Postal stamps are stickers. Ok, boomers, I’ll admit that they’re stickers with some economic value, but stickers nonetheless.

And I’m not trying to buy those stickers at a grocery store: I’m buying them from a company whose business is to pick up and deliver things.

Stickers are not exactly a high tech item. With a $50 printer, a free app, and some special paper from Office Depot, I can make stickers too.

But somehow the USPS can’t reliably do that. If you ever wonder about the incompetence of this company, here’s a perfect example.

How to make the USPS a great company? Give them competition. See my earlier article this week about Aeroflot. Aeroflot looked like a no hope company in 1990, and now they’re one of the world’s best airlines.

There’s hope for the post office there as well.