With declining mail volume, work-force cuts and the looming closure of hundreds of post offices, the Postal Service hopes you will also care enough to buy that card at one of its branches.

It's been a few weeks since 1,500 post offices across the country began selling Hallmark greeting cards as part of a one-year experiment that could eventually establish greeting card sales in all 34,000 postal outlets.

Greeting cards are currently available at 29 post offices in Maryland and Virginia. In the wide, wide world of greeting card retailers, the Greeting Card Association reports that the trial postal locations join more than 100,000 other retail outlets already doing business.

For the Postal Service, the idea of "doing business" is critical to a bottom line that has been massively affected by the one-two punch of new technologies and the economic slowdown. The Postal Service estimates a decline of 10 billion pieces of mail in each of the next two years, going from a high of 213 billion pieces of mail in 2006 to 170 billion in 2010. Postmaster General John E. Potter described the service as being in "acute financial crisis." In September, the House voted to allow the Postal Service to reduce its annual payment to a retiree health care fund by $4 billion as a means to avoid a budget shortfall.

The last checkup we performed on the ailing service revealed it was cutting hours, merging mail routes and amputating hundreds of thousands of underperforming iconic blue "snail shell" drop boxes from mail routes nationwide.

The snail reference turned out to be prophetic. Web-based interactions and Internet delivery systems have made the postal system seem exactly like that tediously slow gastropod. You'd be hard-pressed to find another organization that needs a get-well remedy as much as the 234-year-old U.S. Postal Service.

But don't count it out yet. It's got the greeting-card initiative under way, and hopes are that card sales will help boost postal retail sales by 30 to 40 percent. Information from the Greeting Card Association puts such expectations in perspective. Ninety percent of American households buy greeting cards. We spend from 50 cents to $10 per card and purchase an average of 35 cards annually. All of which adds up to more than $7.5 billion in retail card sales every year.

And the Postal Service recently went mobile, offering its most popular usps.com functions on cell phones and other mobile devices. Now, services such as Track & Confirm, post office locator and ZIP code lookup are literally in hand. Also on the horizon is the goal of offering goods and services such as banking, insurance and cell phones.

Only time will tell if that other adage remains true: "Nothing can stop the U.S. Mail."

Post your comments » 2 comments November 07, 2009 @ 07:13 AM: fnp.reader Over the years the USPS has become more of a seller of trinket merchandise than a provider of service. Foreign postal services still consider their mail delivery systems to be government services to the people, don't use it as a merchandise promoter and don't expect it to pay its own way. The payoff is getting the letter delivered and having experienced a plethora of foreign postal services I state unequivocally they USPS is the best by far. Getting rural service to a certain development in Buckeystown excepted. REPORT TO MODERATOR November 07, 2009 @ 09:24 AM: dcg326 Taking business from the small businesses at card shops??? REPORT TO MODERATOR