10 things doomed to go the way of the dinosaur

1. The U.S. Postal Service

The independent government agency will be in a period of decline for years to come, but the future is clear. The U.S. Postal Service as we know it will gradually fade away. And along with it, so will go postcards, the hobby of stamp collecting, disgruntled postal workers with a gun fetish, and other things.
(See “Mail boxes, stamp collecting threatened by Post Office demise.”)

2. Pennies

Americans finally are wising up to the fact that pennies are unnecessary and wasteful. One-cent coins cost 2 cents to manufacture, creating a money losing-proposition for the U.S. government. They also are a drag on productivity and a hazard to children and pets if swallowed. Plus, they are becoming irrelevant as financial transactions increasingly switch to electronic payment options.
(See “Time is running out for the U.S. penny.”)

3. One-dollar bills

The issue of eliminating the $1 bill from U.S. currency in favor of $1 coins comes up every few years. Old coots clinging to the past have saved the paper bill for now. But eventually the federal government will do the right thing and ax the $1 bill. Doing so could save taxpayers $4.4 billion over the next 30 years.
(See “U.S. needs to stop printing $1 bills.”)

4. Business cards

Business cards are being replaced by LinkedIn. The personal information on business cards can quickly become out of date. People change jobs, job titles, mailing addresses, phone numbers and email accounts. The beauty of LinkedIn is that the user keeps his or her contact information and career data current themselves. Business cards are joining Rolodexes in the dust bin.
(See “Business cards becoming passe, replaced by LinkedIn.”)

5. Phone books

The clock is ticking for phone books. Most people today get phone numbers for businesses, government agencies and persons by searching the Internet. But there’s still money to be made selling advertising for yellow page directories, so phone books persist. But not for long.
(See “Phone books deserve to die.”)

6. Newspapers

Newspapers in print form are fading fast as more people get their news online. Some pundits are predicting that newspapers in the U.S. will start disappear en masse within a few years as circulation declines and production costs increase.
(See “The end of newspapers threatens paperboys and kidnapper props.”)

7. Magazines

Like newspapers, print magazines are declining in circulation, because of the rise of the Internet. Print magazines are likely to become a niche media as opposed to a mass media in the years to come. The cachet of being a magazine’s cover subject or cover model probably will diminish as well.
(See “Magazine sales continue to slide; Format’s future in doubt.”)

8. Copy editors

To save money, many publishers have cut the ranks of copy editors and fact checkers. The results have been a lot of Internet LOLs as the public shares the latest typos, misspellings and other embarrassing errors copy editors presumably would have caught.
(See “Copy editors are an expense some publishers don’t want.”)

9. Ownership of music, movies, other software

First it was physical media (CDs, DVDs, etc.) that were threatened by the shift to digital, now it’s ownership of entertainment and software. Consumers are shifting from owning digital media files to using subscription and ad-supported streaming media services. Plus, people are beginning to subscribe to PC software instead of owning it outright.
(See “Ownership of music, movies and software slipping away.”)

10. Concert and sports tickets as memorabilia and collectables

As more ticket sellers switch to electronic tickets that can be printed at home or scanned from a mobile device, collecting concert and sports tickets as mementos is likely to wane. A cheap printed ticket doesn’t have the same allure as a glossy, souvenir ticket. Plus, since they can be easily copied, they have no collector value. (See “Concert and sports tickets disappearing as memorabilia and collectables.”

Photos:
Post office comic by Marshall Ramsey (Postal Cartoons on Pinterest);
Mailbox as endangered species by Carmichael Lynch (See Carmichael Lynch Flickr page and article by Laughing Squid.)
Newspaper Road is a dead end (See article by Romenesko);
Concert Ticket Album for sale on Amazon.com.

Mail boxes, stamp collecting threatened by Post Office demise

The eventual extinction of the Post Office threatens a lot of things. Some of those things already are moving to digital alternatives, such as personal letters and cards, bills, magazines and catalogs.
Other things will become museum pieces and anachronisms.
Here’s a list of 10 things that will go away or be dramatically changed by the end of the U.S. Postal Service:

Mail collection boxes

When the U.S. Postal Service inevitably recedes from the American way of life, so will those ubiquitous blue metal mail collection boxes on street corners.

U.S. Mail trucks

Also going bye-bye will be those cute white U.S. Mail trucks with blue and red trim.

‘Mailbox baseball’

Gradually homes won’t need mail boxes either. So vandals who like to play “mailbox baseball” will have to find a new target for their aggression.

Stamp collecting

Stamp collecting will continue, but as a rich person’s hobby, not as a pastime for average Americans. Children won’t be starting new collections because there won’t be any new stamps produced. And artists won’t have the Postal Service as an outlet for their work.

Postcards

When the Post Office goes away, so will postcards. Picture postcards from vacation spots like Las Vegas, Hollywood, Miami and New York City will become simply collector’s items.

The expression ‘going postal’

Someday we’ll have to explain to our kids what the expression “going postal” means. Maybe some other location will get a reputation for workplace violence and get its own expression.

Computer icons of letter envelopes and mail boxes

In the near future, it won’t make sense to use icons like letter envelopes and mail boxes for email programs. They will make about as much sense as using an LP record player as an icon for music application.

Netflix DVDs by mail

Netflix sees the writing on the wall. It knows that the future of its business is in streaming video, not DVDs by mail. It has stopped advertising its U.S.-only DVD service in favor of streaming. The number of DVD subscribers has plummeted in the last two years. Changes at the post office, such as stopping Saturday delivery and raising postage prices, will only accelerate this decline.

Letter-sized envelopes

If people no longer send letters, there can’t be much of a market for letter-sized envelopes.

Post Offices as objects of civic pride

Getting a post office in your small town used to be a sign that your village had arrived. Soon many of those rural post offices will be shut down to save money.

Photos: U.S. Mail truck from Wikimedia Commons; U.S. Postal Service mail boxes from Wikimedia Commons; Stamp collecting stamp photo from Encyclopedia Britannica Blog; Netflix mail envelopes from Netflix PR.

U.S. Postal Service funnies

The U.S. Postal Service is a joke. To humor writers, at least.
The financially struggling organization has lost its relevance with the rise of the Internet. Last week, it announced plans to stop Saturday mail deliveries to save money.
Comedians, cartoonists and other funny people took the occasion to mock the independent government agency.
Investor’s Business Daily political cartoonist Michael Ramirez portrayed the USPS as a dinosaur in a Feb. 8 comic.
Cartoonist Marshall Ramsey mocked the postal service’s “forever stamps” as “non-forever stamps” given the many post office closings.
Humor website The Onion piled on with a bunch of articles, including a list of measures the Post Office is taking to balance its budget (“Now accepting pipe bombs and anthrax for regular delivery”). The Onion also did its regular man-on-the-street interview piece on the subject.
On Feb. 6, it ran a satire article titled, “Postal Service: ‘And Wait Until You Cocksuckers See What We Do With Wednesdays.’”
College Humor tweeted, “Gonna be hard to tell my kids that mail once came on Saturdays, what with also having to explain concepts like mail, literacy, the US govt.”
But making fun of the Post Office is nothing new. Here are some gems from 2011 and 2012.

The Post Office Is Getting Desperate (College Humor; Feb. 12, 2012)

The U.S. Postal Service Has a Hip and Cool Ad (Conan; Sept. 8, 2011)

10 Stamps We’d Like To See Before The Postal Service Closes (Huffington Post; Sept. 15, 2011)

Colbert unveils ‘Farewell to Postage’ stamp (Federal Times; Sept. 16, 2011)

U.S. Postal Service is going away – Deal with it

The U.S. Postal Service has been dying a slow death for years. But you can tell the end is near.
This week, the postal service announced that it will stop delivering mail on Saturdays in a cost-saving move, starting in August. It will continue to deliver packages on Saturdays, but not regular mail. Congress could still step in and force the post office to deliver mail on Saturdays though, but they’d be missing the point.
The U.S. Postal Service is no longer needed. It’s been replaced by the Internet for many uses. Email has replaced letters and online payments have replaced paper bills. Magazines and DVDs by mail are being replaced by digital alternatives. And UPS and FedEx have taken up the businesses of package and express delivery. What’s left is a lot of junk mail.
The U.S. Postal Service won’t go away overnight. But if it did, Americans would get by. They’d adapt. Still, legislators will prop it up for years to come to get the votes of nostalgic voters and postal workers.
A poll on Yahoo News today showed that most online readers (81%) wouldn’t be upset if the postal service stopped Saturday delivery. They see the writing on the wall. The postal service lost $15.9 billion last year. It will have to make drastic changes to survive, including closing thousands of post office branches nationwide.

Related reading:

U.S. Post Office Plans to Stop Saturday Mail Deliveries (Bloomberg; Feb. 7, 2013)

Goodbye Saturday Mail? Postal Service Plans Cuts (AP, ABC News; Feb. 6, 2013)

Photo: Mail delivery trucks by photographer Kristoffer Tripplaar. He’s made a hobby out of taking pictures of old post offices. He posts them on his webpage for the Post Office Project.
Tripplaar told the New York Times that he’s drawn to the “modern-day ruin” of the postal service. “I’ve always been fascinated with broken-down things that are fading away,” he said. “It’s slowly dying.” 

Pace of change is making me feel old, nostalgic

A lot has changed in my 50 years on this rock.
I was a boy in the 1960s and came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
I remember an advertisement for McDonald’s restaurants in the early 1970s that touted “Change back from your dollar” when you ordered a hamburger, fries and small drink. And I chuckled when McDonald’s started serving breakfast in 1971 – like a hamburger joint could make eggs and pancakes.
The ’70s and ’80s were a simpler time. We grew up without self-service pay-at-the-pump gas and ATMs. And we used travel agents to book flights and hotel stays.
While in high school, I worked in the catalog department at the Sears store in Vernon Hills, Ill. (1979-80). People would order items from the catalog and pick them up at the store. Sears stopped printing its general catalog in 1993 as online sales took off. (See Sears Archives and Wall Street Journal.)
When I was in college, the federal government broke up the AT&T phone monopoly in 1984. People used to lease their phones like a cable TV box. After AT&T was split up into regional Bell operating companies, people could buy their own home phones.
From the late 1970s through the 1980s, my friends and I spent a lot of time in video game arcades. I wasted a lot of quarters on games like Space Invaders, Asteroids (see photo), Pac-Man, Dig Dug and Q-Bert. But home video game systems put an end to the arcades.
Students didn’t have personal computers when I went to college (1980-84). Many brought typewriters. The computers at my college, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, were mainframes that processed punch cards. Those machines were in high demand and were part of the coursework for science and business students.
We played music on vinyl LP records and cassette tapes in college. Compact Discs were just coming out then.
VCRs didn’t become mainstream until around the mid-1980s. Before then, if you missed a television episode, you had to wait for reruns or you were out of luck. Now VCRs are gone, replaced by digital video recorders and streaming online video.
Baby boomers like me are starting to wax nostalgic for all the things that are going away.
You can see it in the news stories about Kodak getting out of the camera and film businesses, and the disappearance of book stores.
Things on the endangered list include paper newspapers and magazines; the U.S. Postal Service; DVDs; alarm clocks and wrist watches.

Is the U.S. Postal Service going the way of the buggy whip? Not if Netflix can help it

Given the major changes brought by the Internet, it’s not hard for me to imagine the U.S. Postal Service as we know it going away.
Letters and cards are being replaced by e-mail and electronic greetings. More services are promoting electronic billing to save money and go green by reducing paper use. Catalogs, magazines and direct mail could all be replaced by online versions. Packages are being delivered by private operations such as UPS and FedEx.
Meanwhile, the Postal Service is losing money hand over fist.
During fiscal year 2008, which ended Sept. 30, the U.S. Postal Service lost $2.81 billion on revenue of $74.9 billion. Its debt has been growing rapidly and at the end of last year stood at $7.2 billion.
Last year, it delivered 202.7 billion pieces of mail, down 4.5% from the prior year or 9.5 billion fewer pieces of mail.
To deal with rising costs, the Postal Service has reduced employment and closed facilities. It’s even proposed cutting one day of delivery from its current 6-day-a-week delivery schedule.
One big user of the U.S. Postal Service is online DVD rental service Netflix. The Los Gatos, Calif.-based company ships on average about 2 million DVDs a day by mail.
I asked Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently what he thought would happen to the Postal Service.
“That’s a critical service,” he told me May 27. “In the worst case, the U.S. government will step in and give them a bailout, right? That’s the democratic way. So they’ll continue to deliver for a very long time.”
In the near-term, he’s right, of course. The federal government isn’t going to let Postal Service disappear. The Postal Service is an independent agency of the U.S. government.
But even Netflix is preparing for the transition of its business to the Web. It already offers streaming of movies and TV shows over the Internet to PCs and to TVs.
Netflix predicts that half of its business will be from Internet streaming in 2014, five years from now.

Proposed postal change bad news for Netflix

The U.S. Postal Service said Wednesday that it wants to cut back deliveries to five days a week. That would mean one less delivery day for Netflix subscribers to receive DVDs in the mail.
Netflix prides itself on fast delivery of DVDs in metropolitan areas and this could harm its reputation.
The postmaster general asked Congress to lift the requirement that the agency deliver mail six days a week. The postal service is facing massive deficits because of dwindling mail volume, according to an Associated Press story.
It’s a good thing that Netflix is promoting its digital delivery of movies over the Internet as an alternative at no extra charge for subscribers.
Rain, snow or heat can’t stop postal workers from making their appointed rounds, but budget cuts can.