lpp's Journal: Moving and the Post Office

My other article from k5. Again, consolidating here due to distancing myself from k5.

We are a more mobile society today than ever before, with people moving more often and for reasons that would have given pause years ago. Yet we are also a more connected society, in every sense, communicating with more entities than ever before. Including through the postal service. Yet one problem that this brings about, particularly with regard to mail delivery, has only been getting worse and with no apparent means of correction in sight. This article has a decidely American slant, but only due to lack of familiarity with the postal services of other countries.

Recently in the U.S., a law was put into effect that was intended to provide more flexibility when switching cell phone carriers. You can now (theoretically anyway) switch cell carriers and still keep the same phone number, thus eliminating one significant hurdle (for some anyway) to switching carriers.

But what of your mail? Most people change places of residence from time to time and must go through the irritation of contacting each of the entities we correspond with via postal mail with our new address. Why must this be when the technology exists now to make this a non-issue?

Without getting into a history of the postal service, the problem comes down to the idea that mail is sent to a physical residence. Yet that's not really the intent. The intent is that the mail gets sent to a person. Where I live is simply an attribute of who I am.

What is needed, then, is a postal ID (PID henceforth). The PID would be linked to a physical location and to your name and identity in a database administered by the USPS. When you move, simply update the USPS database with your new mailing locale and the mail begins to switch immediately. You would be guaranteed not to miss any important mail due to the move and delays in receipt due to redirection would disappear.

This approach has other benefits too. Presumably such information as is kept in the database would be available only to USPS workers and authorized law enforcement personnel. As a result, gaining access to your PID would not be an immediate means of locating you, unlike gaining access to your normal physical mailing address. Thus anyone who is attempting to avoid an abusive ex-spouse, a stalker or whomever, would be able to use their PID on official documents and avoid exposure to searches that could turn them up.

This would be strictly optional. If a concern arises about cost, allow for an annual surcharge to keep your PID active. Beyond the initial costs to install and begin using such a system, the overhead would likely not rise greatly as the number of users in the system increased, whereas the income generated would rise directly, so presumably this would be a profit center, possibly providing a means to help offset deficits in down years and helping to keep postal rates stable.