Post Offices Aren’t What They Use To Be
Many Martin County residents are worried about sending checks through the mail…and I can see why.
When you hear about mail being stolen from post offices, you think about the Old West and train holdups…not the world in 2024 with the modern internet. But here you have the dilemma about an institution that looks like something Benjamin Franklin would be at home with.
I don’t usually go to the Post Office. But one Saturday night q while back, I dropped off something and I saw a couple of sacks of mail in the foyer. I suspected that they were left there by either postal employees or contractors who transport the mail. This seems to be the scenario where the theft occurs. In Fort Pierce, apparently mail was taken right off the loading docks. The Martin County Sheriff’s Office told me there are no cameras anywhere.
Snyder’s people didn’t even know about the thefts until citizens began to make complaints about their checks being altered. While Sheriff Snyder went to the press so that people would know, the USPS has been largely silent on this. The only confirmation was that it happened in three Martin County locations, Stuart, Palm City and Hobe Sound. How many bags of mail stolen are still a secret. They have not been forthcoming to the Sheriff with much information.
While local authorities are left to clean up after the Feds leave citizens wandering what to do, you would think they could be more cooperative. Are there any new security measures in place? We don’t know because it is a “state secret” I guess.
As a citizen that is down to writing a few checks a month, I am looking to learn how I can eliminate all checks. Today most of my bills are online and I have set up automatic payment. When I was in business as a property agent, I had thousands of checks coming in a month. Today most of what I get through the mail doesn’t even make it inside the door. The “blue bin” gets most of it.
I guess the institution that brought the country together is more and more useless in the modern world as a method of sending us needed information. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a letter and mailed it. Even greeting cards are more and more an anomaly. And every year less money comes into USPS coffers.
As the costs escalate to use the mail…fewer people do. At the same time, if it is now unsafe to use the service because your check may not get there, besides the expense, then that tells us something about us as a nation. At least if you dropped a letter off at Ben Franklin’s post office, it wasn’t stolen.
