The postal service was once central to our social, financial, and intellectual lives. Illustration by Sophia Foster-Dimino

Earlier this month, the price of a first-class stamp fell for the first time since 1919. The drop, from forty-nine cents to forty-seven cents, took place following the expiration of a rate surcharge that was enacted in 2014 to help the U.S. Postal Service deal with the aftereffects of the Great Recession. The dip likely won’t matter much to most consumers, but it amounts to a loss of about two billion dollars a year for an organization that lost 5.1 billion dollars in the 2015 fiscal year alone—enough, that is, to substantially worsen the financial troubles that the service has been facing ever since the Internet rendered its first-class-mail business pretty much irrelevant. The press release announcing the price cut sounded as though it had been written by the most sullen clerk at your local post office: Megan J. Brennan, the Postmaster General, was quoted calling the rate decrease “unfortunate,” and the service vowed to work to reinstate the surcharge.

Despite the service’s evident money problems, squeezing two more cents out of each letter may seem, to some, like just about the laziest possible way to raise revenue. Contrast that with postal services in other countries, many of which are managing to reinvent themselves: last year, the Times wrote that Singapore Post has opened an e-commerce branch that sells consulting services to companies hoping to reach Asian customers; elsewhere, Australia’s postal service is reportedly testing drone delivery, and Italy’s sells mobile-phone services.

Why does the U.S.P.S. seem to be so comparatively uncreative? To find out about new initiatives that I might have missed, I called Gary Reblin, the service’s vice-president of new products and innovation, a position created in 2012, as the postal system was beginning to recognize the depth of its troubles. Reblin told me that, in order to cut costs, he and his colleagues have been looking at closing some post offices and, instead, offering smaller-scale postal services—an approach that countries like Germany have taken, to good effect. Their attempts to generate more revenue, though, didn’t leave me feeling hopeful. When I asked Reblin to describe some of the coolest examples, he told me about a new feature that lets people get an e-mail alert with images of their mail waiting for them at home; in some cases, they might also be able to click on Web links for advertising flyers. Reblin also mentioned another product, Share Mail, that allows marketers and political campaigns to send pre-paid flyers or pamphlets that you can forward to friends. “Just like social networking,” he said. To me, it sounded more like the U.S.P.S. was working to make junk mail even more annoying—a hunch that was reinforced when I learned that advertising now makes up more than half of the mail that is delivered. Most of the innovation taking place at the Postal Service seems to be aimed either at downsizing or making its remaining customers marginally happier, rather than creating new revenue streams by anticipating what Americans might actually want.

You’d never know it from the current state of affairs, but the Postal Service was once central to our social, financial, and intellectual lives. A working paper published in January by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that post offices were crucial to American innovation. The researchers, who studied the relationship between the number of post offices in a given county and the number of patents filed there, found data suggesting that, from 1804 to 1899—a rich period of invention in the U.S.—the establishment of new post offices made people living nearby likelier to file patents. The authors considered several potential reasons for this, from the obvious fact that being near a post office made it easier to file a patent application to the idea that post offices served as a kind of proto-Internet, helping to distribute information to and from counties fortunate enough to have access to them. But the researchers argued, in particular, that post offices were “a proxy for the general presence and infrastructural power of the state”—that is, they were an important expression of the government’s presence and functionality, which supported innovation.

The Postal Service is no longer as significant a manifestation of state power, of course. But the U.S.P.S. still has infrastructural might, in the form of a highly interconnected network of well-placed buildings and people. So here’s a thought experiment: What if we were to reconceive the postal system in light of that network? What more could the service do with its infrastructure?

There is actually an agency within the U.S.P.S. that has been thinking about these questions: its office of the inspector general, which is responsible for conducting independent audits. David C. Williams, who recently retired after serving as the inspector general for more than twelve years, defined his position expansively, publishing reports on all kinds of things that the Postal Service could do. Some of these services would rely on postal carriers, who visit most of the homes in the country almost daily. These employees could, for example, deliver groceries, alert social-services agencies when people on their routes need help, or, even more ambitiously, supply “wellness services.” The latter might include delivering medicine to elderly people, or even just checking in on them in exchange for a fee. The idea seems particularly useful in rural areas, where health services are scarce.

Other proposals from the inspector general’s office would take advantage of the Postal Service’s buildings—for instance, by allowing post offices to provide basic financial services, like cashing checks, keeping savings accounts, and even taking out small loans. Countries such as Brazil, China, and New Zealand have been doing this for years. As Lisa J. Servon has pointed out on this site, many low-income people, repelled by high fees or generally mistrustful, don’t use banks. And in many parts of the country where executives have decided it’s not worth their while to invest, financial services are simply absent, making them effectively banking deserts. As it happens, nearly sixty per cent of post-office branches are in Zip Codes where there are either one or no bank branches, according to a white paper on the topic from the inspector general.

Thus far, none of the inspector general’s proposals has gained much traction, in part because the U.S.P.S. doesn’t have the authority to bring them about. When I asked Reblin about the possibility of getting more creative, he pointed out that, whereas other countries’ postal systems are free to provide non-postal services, U.S.P.S.’s legal mandate doesn’t allow it to do much besides handle mail and packages. Some within the postal system have advocated for the government to change this, but, Reblin said, “My objective right now is to innovate within the law.” The U.S.P.S. also employs thousands of unionized workers who might not be excited about seeing their responsibilities expanded, presumably without a pay raise. And adding new services would, of course, require hiring or retraining employees, as well as reorganizing infrastructure to handle the new work and deal with the related security and privacy issues—significant tasks for an organization under serious financial pressure.

Fees for some of the more innovative new services could potentially bring in significant revenue to offset the costs. But even so, and even with the U.S.P.S.’s ongoing and substantial financial losses, Congress hasn’t shown much of an appetite for allowing the service to experiment. John Callan, an industry consultant, pointed out to me that it’s worth weighing whether the post office has accomplished what it was intended to do—perhaps it doesn’t need to be drastically reinvented so much as it needs to stay afloat for as long as we continue to send and receive mail. That seems to be the general sentiment in the Presidential race, where Bernie Sanders, who wants post offices to offer basic financial services, is the only candidate who seems to have anything to say at all about the U.S.P.S. Unless, that is, you consider an entirely different vision that was set in motion years ago: in D.C., Donald Trump’s organization is turning the iconic Old Post Office into a luxury hotel.