USPS Wants to Attach Electronic Sensors to Your Mail, Not Sure Why Yet

The United States Postal
Service (USPS) wants to slap an electronic sensor on your letters
to grandma so they can become part of the buzz-wordy “Internet of
Things,” and the postal service is offering $100,000 to the
person who can figure out how and why they should do that.

From the
proposal, which came out Tuesday:

• Research the current and near-future developments of the
  Internet of Things, provide a workable definition, major facts,
  trends and implications for the Postal Service;
• Provide a vision for the Internet of Things applied to the
  Postal Service (the Internet of Postal Things — IoPT): a conceptual
  design of how new sensor and other data collection technologies
  could increase the ability of Postal Service infrastructure to
  create value to its business, customers and stakeholders through
  data;
• Identify the components of the postal physical infrastructure
  that could lend themselves to the collection of new types of data.
  …
• Identify possible areas of application for the data
  collected.

Computerworld (which, notably, just announced the

end its 47-year print run)
explains that “the postal service hopes that an integration of
[information technology] and new sensor-based technologies can
bring ‘dramatic improvements’ to postal operations in terms of new
product offerings, better operational diagnostics, and insights
into consumer behavior,” but right now the federal agency is
essentially just “fishing for ideas.”

The agency already
collects data on every letter and box you ship, so it’s
unlikely that this could make the USPS more intrusive in any
meaningful way. 

Technological innovation shakes things up and brings down costs,
which is great, but it can’t get people excited about using
something that’s still slower and more expensive than email. It’s a
case of too little, too late for the Post Office. Headlines have
for years been noting the federal agency’s prolonged death rattle,
and a digital tracker cannot turn around such titanic governmental
inefficiency.

“With a net loss of $1.9 billion” in the second quarter of
fiscal year 2014, the Post Office acknowledged in
May, “this marks the 20th of the last 22 quarters it has sustained
a loss.” That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though. Back in 2012,
the USPS recorded net losses of $16 billion. The fact that it has
also defaulted on
billions of dollars of pre-funding for retiree payments in the
last few years doesn’t bode well either. 

The most optimistic spin the agency’s chief financial officer,
Joseph Corbett, can put on the situation is that “the financial
hole we’re in is so deep, we can’t fill in this hole every year
even when we return to profitability.” He said that in an
interview the same day the electronic sensor proposal came
out.