How The Progress Of Mail Service In The US Correlate With Shipping Costs
Jun 10th, 2010 Posted in family | no comment »Regardless the type of business one decides to become engaged in, there will always be a need to get whatever the product from point of origin to the market. This has not always been such a significant part of doing business, though it has always been a part of the process. The greater societal development has become, the greater the need for speedy inexpensive shipping.
As recently as three decades ago, the cost of moving product from place to place around the country was far less, though never insignificant. Smart businesses have always tried to keep careful tabs on such expenditures to ensure they did not get out of hand. Unfortunately, one of the key ingredients to transportation is oil, and we are dependent in large part on foreign oil. This has left us vulnerable at times to the political whims of other nations, with concomitant negative impact on business.
But the cost of getting goods around is not exclusively due to the cost of transportation. Packages require packaging, and much of that is also dependent on the price of oil, so we have double the impact on business. But in addition to these costs, the size and geography of the US has always had an impact on delivering mail and packages.
From the beginning of the nation the notion of delivering packages and mail was an especially important process. The postal service was a mammoth enterprise with a truly nation building impact. Benjamin Franklin became our first postmaster general in 1775, earlier than the signing of the declaration of independence. Unfortunately, mail delivery was not equally available to all Americans.
As things develop, the easiest methods were harnessed first, so people who lived in the cities began receiving official free mail service in 1863. It would be three decades before an organization representing the interests of the farming community could coerce congress into officially launching rural free delivery. But even this new service did not reach all Americans, the west was largely without service.
The idea of free postal service throughout the United States was egalitarian but in its practical execution it was expensive. There was considerable resistance to the notion for that expense and because the companies that made their living delivering mail to the farmlands believed it would destroy their business, stores in town feared it would reduce the number of visits by rural residents and would therefore decrease their market.
Rural free delivery, the meaning behind the letters in the TV show Mayberry R. F. D. Came to be synonymous for living in a distant isolated area. The notion of making postal delivery available to all was a grand one, but the cost of providing it would eventually catch up to the young nation who had to initiate postage stamps and compulsory prepayment to keep it.
Today we take the ability to transfer packages across the nation and across the globe for granted. We even have the ability to get things delivered throughout the US overnight and anywhere in the world in just a few days. This has allowed the process of doing business to become and remain truly international. But despite all our progress, it is folly to enter into any business with carefully assessing the cost related to shipping.
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