There is something elemental about the mail. Like the rain, snow, heat and “gloom of night” cited in the unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service, it is simply a part of everyday life.
Until one day, perhaps, it isn’t.
These days, the Postal Service is losing money — more than $100 billion since 2007; $9 billion in fiscal year 2025 — and its future is uncertain. President Trump has called it “a tremendous loser for this country.” He has also floated the idea of privatizing the institution, which has roots going back to 1775, when Benjamin Franklin led the colonial mail service.
Another threat to its current structure came last week, when the postmaster general, David Steiner, announced he was seeking bids for so-called last-mile deliveries at 33,000 locations across the United States. “You know, within probably 12 to 24 months, we are out of cash,” said Mr. Steiner, a logistics executive and onetime FedEx board member who assumed his current role in July.
With the Postal Service seemingly in jeopardy, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the nation’s more than 500,000 postal employees. During the holiday season, the busiest time of year for the agency, a mail carrier laden with packages is part Santa Claus, part federal emissary.
“I was the face of the United States government for a lot of the people on my route,” said Stephen Starring Grant, a former postal worker. “Here comes the mailman up my driveway. He’s wearing the flag. No matter what else is going wrong, you’re still getting your mail.”
In “Mailman,” a memoir published this year, Mr. Grant, 55, writes that he was responsible for the delivery of not only “flats” (magazines), letters, bills and many, many Amazon packages, but also an assortment of civic ideals that may be in short supply these days: “Continuity. Safety. Normalcy. Companionship. Civilization.”
The mail carrier’s blue-gray uniform, introduced in 1892, inspired Ralph Lauren to release a clothing collection in commemoration of the post office’s 250th anniversary this year. Otherwise, there has been little acknowledgment of the landmark birthday, perhaps a reflection of how the service is taken for granted.
In popular culture, depictions of the Postal Service have undergone an evolution over the decades.
Long before the rise of junk mail and group texts, Norman Rockwell came up with an idealistic portrait of a mail carrier in the 1949 painting “The Jolly Postman.” There he is, a jovial figure in his woolen uniform and earmuffs, surrounded by laughing children as he marches through the snow under the weight of Christmas parcels.
The painting suited a time when people were accustomed to sending long letters to friends and loved ones, when mail carriers were prized as messengers who brought good tidings from the wider world. The positive depictions continued into 1961, when the Marvelettes, an early Motown group, put the mail carrier front and center in “Please Mr. Postman,” a No. 1 single later covered by the Beatles. In 1970, Stevie Wonder relied on a postal conceit in the joyous love song “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours).”
Before he became a celebrated singer and songwriter, John Prine delivered the mail in Maywood, a Chicago suburb, from 1964 to 1969. While lugging his bag and observing scenes of daily life along his route, he composed some of his most beloved songs, including “Hello in There,” an affecting portrait of the daytime loneliness of older people.
“I always likened the mail route to a library with no books,” Mr. Prine once said. “I passed the time each day making up these little ditties.”
In the 1980s, postal employees were represented by the buffoonish know-it-all Cliff Clavin on “Cheers.” The next decade brought Newman, the cartoonishly malevolent mail carrier on “Seinfeld.” Both sitcom characters made their daily rounds in cities and became stand-ins for a government work force often viewed as surly and overwhelmed.
In much of Middle America, the perception of the mail carrier has been quite different, said Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
In rural areas, Mr. Kosar said, the Postal Service has maintained an important presence, delivering prescription medicines and other necessities to isolated parts of the country.
“Your mail carrier is someone you know in your community,” Mr. Kosar added. “These people show up six days a week at your house. How could you not get used to seeing their faces?”
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The reverse is also true. In “Mailman,” Mr. Grant portrays himself and his colleagues as collectors of intimate knowledge about communities and their inhabitants.
“If you think your carrier doesn’t notice when you order a sex toy,” he writes, “you’re wrong.”
Then again, stories abound of mail carriers checking in on older adults or ailing citizens and assisting emergency medical workers after hurricanes or floods. They are known to deliver packages even on their days off. And they go the extra mile to intercept mistakenly sent parcels or to find addresses based on scant information.
Last October, Dori Carson, a carrier on Chicago’s South Side, noticed something amiss on her route: An elderly woman hadn’t collected her mail for three days. Ms. Carson alerted a neighbor. The neighbor called emergency medical workers, who found the woman lying at the bottom of her stairs and took her to the hospital.
In July, Chris Perez, a carrier in Westchester County, N.Y., took a break from his rounds to rescue a man trapped on the balcony of a multifamily house that was going up in flames. Thinking quickly, Mr. Perez climbed his mail truck and leaped from its roof to his endangered customer. “I feel like it’s something anyone would do,” he told a reporter for WABC-TV.
Mr. Trump’s remarks on the future of mail delivery are worrisome to members of the American Postal Workers Union, who rallied behind the slogan “U.S. Mail Not for Sale” at protests in March. But there’s little doubt that the Postal Service is in financial straits and must change.
Other Western countries, like Britain and Canada, have either privatized the mail or ended door-to-door delivery in recent years. The Danish postal service announced it would stop delivering letters after 400 years at the end of this month.
Those changes have arisen in reaction to the drop in mail volume during the digital age. In 2024, the U.S. Postal Service delivered 112.5 billion pieces of mail and packages, down nearly 50 percent from 2006. The Government Accountability Office has called its business model “unsustainable.”
Jonathan Smith, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, suggested ways the Postal Service could make it past the cash crunch. These include selling fishing and hunting licenses, being allowed to deliver wine, beer and liquor (currently prohibited by law) and letting the public use the vehicle charging stations now being installed at post offices across the country as part of the agency’s ongoing electrification efforts for its mail trucks.
“The problem is you need the powers that be to see the postal service as a service, not a business,” Mr. Smith said. “To not take these ideas seriously comes from greed.”
Unlike many of his fellow conservatives, Mr. Kosar, of the American Enterprise Institute, has argued for more investment in the service, including an annual appropriation from Congress. “The U.S. Postal Service is, as the saying goes, too big and too important to fail,” Mr. Kosar wrote in The Atlantic.
The shift toward package delivery brought about by online shopping has helped generate revenue. And since 2012, the Postal Service has cut some costs by mandating that new housing developments have centralized delivery. It’s not out of the question that robots in self-driving postal trucks will deliver to these cluster boxes in the near future.
If that happens, a degree of neighborliness will be lost, said Mr. Grant, the author.
He offered the example of a woman who wrote him a letter after she read his book. For his address, all she put down was “Stephen Starring Grant, author of ‘Mailman,’ Blacksburg, Va.”
“Got straight to my mailbox,” Mr. Grant said. “That’s part of the service that comes with having a mailman come to your house. They know you. They know your family.”
Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times.
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