It's always a big red-letter day for Stay and the U.S. Postal Service

I was a newspaper carrier in my youth, growing up in Maine, and I know all about snow and rain and heat and gloom of night.

So I have great empathy for what the men and women of the U.S. Postal Service go through.

But my connection with the U.S. mail runs much deeper than that. As a child, writing and receiving letters was an avenue for adventure. It was how I collected autographs of my favorite hockey players and comics, how I wrote scathing letters to a local TV sportscaster who I thought gave short shrift to hockey coverage, how I ordered merchandise from my favorite hockey teams.

Yup, I sure loved hockey, but I also loved the postal service.

Fast forward several decades, and those passions persist. The former is evident in our Hockey Night in Hershey collection of tees, pennants and banners. The latter is why I’m writing this blog post.

Every tee, every tumbler, every hat that Stay has ever shipped has been sent via first-class or priority mail. In the two and one-half years of Stay’s existence, we’ve had nary a problem with delivery of our products, from Maine to California.

And service has only gotten better since we moved the Stay global headquarters into downtown Hershey, on a route with terrific mail carriers and just one block from the Hershey post office.

America’s favorite federal agency

I’m not alone in the high regard with which I hold the postal service: three in four Americans say the postal service is doing a good or excellent job, according to a 2019 Gallup poll, making it their favorite federal agency.

The coronavirus pandemic has hit postal workers hard, with hundreds of employees having tested positive for COVID-19 (resulting in at least 19 deaths) and mail volume down by one-third compared with the year earlier. Yet those intrepid souls continue to complete their appointed rounds.

The postal service delivered 142 billion pieces of mail in 2019, according to The American Prospect magazine, or around 460 pieces for each of the more than 300 million residential and business addresses it serves.

The article noted the postal service’s remarkable achievement of approaching profitability while still fulfilling its requirement of providing universal service. That is, unlike private companies such as UPS and FedEx, the postal service has to deliver to everyone. Another financial burden is a congressional requirement that the postal service prepay healthcare benefits for retirees 75 years into the future.

I don’t know what the exact remedy is for what ails the postal service.

But I do know that it is a national treasure that must be saved, for the sake of the elderly patient awaiting prescription drugs or the little kid who’s eagerly anticipating a signed photo from his favorite hockey player.

Stay is counting on the postal service, too. We’re grateful for the men and women who keep the mail moving no matter the weather.