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Bloomberg's Leonard on New Book, 'Neither Snow Nor Rain'(Audio) · Bloomberg Intelligence

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  Speaker 1: Broadcasting live to New York, Bloomberg eleven Brio to Washington,
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  Speaker 1: This is taking stock the US Postals Service. They deliver
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  Speaker 1: five hundred and thirteen million pieces of mail a day.
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  Speaker 1: That's more than forty of the world's total volume. They
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  Speaker 1: have the largest fleet of trucks more post offices in
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  Speaker 1: the combined retail outlets of McDonald's, Starbucks, and Walmart. We're
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  Speaker 1: gonna talk to the author of a new book neither
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  Speaker 1: snow now a rain, Devin Leonard. He'll be joining us
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  Speaker 1: right now. Let's go to Catherine Cowdy in the Bloomberg
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  Speaker 1: newsroom for a Bloomberg business flash. Thank you, Pam and Bloomberg.
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  Speaker 1: Slash imagine well. The stock market is clawing back some
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  Speaker 1: of the ground at lost last week. The benchmarks are advancing,
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  Speaker 1: helped by games and banks and consumer discretionary companies. Traders
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  Speaker 1: have lowered their expectations for higher interest rates in June
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  Speaker 1: after day to show manufacturing slowed last month. Tom lee
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  Speaker 1: Had of research at fund Strat Global Advisor says the
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  Speaker 1: SMP five foundered can still post double digit games this year.
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  Speaker 1: Click economic data has improved um. The technicals are certainly
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  Speaker 1: a lot stronger, but I think the hyably the single
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  Speaker 1: easiest thing to focus on is is how good conditions
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  Speaker 1: are in credit markets. Uh, you know, high yields on
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  Speaker 1: track to have a double duty here, and I think
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  Speaker 1: that's all equity investors need to know. Stocks basically followed.
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  Speaker 1: We tag the markets every fifteen minutes throughout the trading day.
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  Speaker 1: Down industrial average is up one points the game of
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  Speaker 1: six ten seven percent, trading at seventeen thousand, eight D
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  Speaker 1: two smps I found it up fourteen point seven tenths
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  Speaker 1: of a percent to two thousand seventy nine. The Nazak
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  Speaker 1: is up thirty two points two thirds of a percent,
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  Speaker 1: trading at forty eight oh seven less Texas in do
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  Speaker 1: we need of crude oil? Down a dollar eighteen a
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  Speaker 1: barrel two point six percent to forty four seventy four.
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  Speaker 1: SPI gold is up sixty cents announced to twelve nine,
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  Speaker 1: and the Tenure Treasury is down eight thirty seconds, with
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  Speaker 1: the YELD at one point eight six percent. Among today's
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  Speaker 1: top business stories, constructions spending increased in March to its
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  Speaker 1: highest level in more than eight years. Games in home
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  Speaker 1: building and non residential construction offset a drop in government projects.
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  Speaker 1: The Commerce Department reported construction spending increased three tens of
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  Speaker 1: a percent in March after a one percent increase in February.
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  Speaker 1: And now let's get an update of some of the
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  Speaker 1: other stories were following today on Bloomberg Radio. Catherine, thank
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  Speaker 1: dot com for details. Today, campaigning in Indiana ahead of
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  Speaker 1: tomorrow's primary, Democrat Bernie Sanders is making it clear he's
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  Speaker 1: switch allegiances. He told supporters in Evansville, Beating the Republican
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  Speaker 1: gonna make to the super delegates in an area where
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  Speaker 1: Hillary Clinton and I agree, and that is, it will
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  Speaker 1: be a tragedy for this country if we end up
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  Speaker 1: with a Donald Trump or some other Republican of the
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  Speaker 1: White House. Mr Trump is once again leveling charges that
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  Speaker 1: his party is working to block his nomination. The bosses
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  Speaker 1: It's a whole rigs situation. The bosses like an Arizona
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  Speaker 1: Pruce so badly it's almost ridiculous. And then the bosses
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  Speaker 1: have delegates to have a delicate, a crooked delegate system
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  Speaker 1: where the going and may try and get delegate so
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  Speaker 1: they can play games. New York Senator Chuck Schumer is
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  Speaker 1: the world from the Bloomberg News Room by Mark Crumpton. Katherine,
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  Speaker 1: Thank you. Now, let's get a quick update of the
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  Speaker 1: equity benchmark Stale Industrial averages up one hundred three points
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  Speaker 1: at seventeen thousand, eight hundred seventy six. Smp F I
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  Speaker 1: founded up fourteen points to two thousand, seventy nine. NASDAC
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  Speaker 1: higher by thirty points, is trading at forty eight oh five.
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  Speaker 1: And that's a Bloomberg Business flash. You're listening to taking
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  Speaker 1: stock with pim Box at Kathleen Hayes on Bloomberg Radio.
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  Speaker 1: The US Postal Service, it is much maligned, but yet
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  Speaker 1: it does deliver of the world's total mail volume. And
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  Speaker 1: if you rely on Amazon to purchase your goods, chances
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  Speaker 1: are the US Postal Service has a hand in getting
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  Speaker 1: them to your door. Here to tell us everything about
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  Speaker 1: the US Postal Services Devin Leonard, reporter for Bloomberg Business Week,
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  Speaker 1: and he's here to tell us about his new book
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  Speaker 1: entitled Neither Snow nor Rain. A landmark century spanning social, political,
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  Speaker 1: and economic history of the United States Post Office. Devin,
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  Speaker 1: always a pleasure. Thanks for coming out, Thank you, and
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  Speaker 1: congratulations on the book. Thanks well, well, you know, it
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  Speaker 1: came out of an article that I wrote for bloomber
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  Speaker 1: Business Week in two thousand and eleven. It was a
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  Speaker 1: cover story called the End of Mail, and that got
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  Speaker 1: a ton of response, and it led led to doing
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  Speaker 1: this book, which is, I guess, not just the end
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  Speaker 1: of mail, but the beginning of mail too. It goes
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  Speaker 1: on the way back to the ancient Abyssinians and uh,
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  Speaker 1: you know, two thousand BCS. So I was gonna make
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  Speaker 1: you say a motto, I guess of letter carriers everywhere,
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  Speaker 1: you know, neither ring nor snow, nor gloom of night
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  Speaker 1: and so on. But tell us a little bit about
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  Speaker 1: your researches for the book, and then we'll get into
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  Speaker 1: some of the things you found out. Well, it was really,
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  Speaker 1: really fascinating. I I and I spent a lot of
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  Speaker 1: time talking to former postmaster generals um and I spent
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  Speaker 1: a bunch of time in Washington. I went out to
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  Speaker 1: Detroit and looked at the archives with the National Letter
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  Speaker 1: Carriers Association, you know, the union for the letter carriers
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  Speaker 1: and also the postal workers side the clerks union. I
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  Speaker 1: guess they have a big archive in New York too
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  Speaker 1: that I sent her researcher too was actually my son
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  Speaker 1: who did a lot of work on this too. But
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  Speaker 1: it's just there's a lot of reading, a lot of talking,
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  Speaker 1: a lot of studying, and the whole thing is pretty fascinating.
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  Speaker 1: And you went into the back rooms of a lot
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  Speaker 1: of the postal service operations. Correct, yes, I have. I
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  Speaker 1: wish I could go to go to even more, but
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  Speaker 1: I've been to a bunch of them in New York
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  Speaker 1: and it's and and it's just really interesting because what
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  Speaker 1: everybody tells you it is, you know, is that you
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  Speaker 1: have all these letter carriers pointing to these stacks of mail,
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  Speaker 1: and they're just saying they used to be three or
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  Speaker 1: four or five times is higher, and and everybody's walking
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  Speaker 1: around with much less mail in their bags, and and
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  Speaker 1: it's you know, it's it's it's disappearing, even though there's
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  Speaker 1: they're still they still delivered. I guess a hundred and
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  Speaker 1: fifty four billion pieces. That's down from uh two hundred
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  Speaker 1: and thirteen billion just a decade ago. So um, so
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  Speaker 1: you know, the future of the postal services kind of uh,
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  Speaker 1: in in doubt, in jeopardy. So now there are people
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  Speaker 1: I don't know any of them, but I do know
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  Speaker 1: people that they love to sort of heap abuse on
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  Speaker 1: the US Postal Service. Tell us a little bit about this.
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  Speaker 1: In some words, just lumbering bureaucracy. But you say it's not,
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  Speaker 1: it's it's efficient. Well, it depends on how you want
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  Speaker 1: to look at it. I mean, clearly, clearly they are
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  Speaker 1: lumbering sometimes, but they deliver more mail per employee than
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  Speaker 1: any other postals, you know, postal service in the world.
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  Speaker 1: So if you just look at efficiency, you know, you know,
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  Speaker 1: measured in in that way, there by far and away
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  Speaker 1: the most efficient postal service in the world are and
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  Speaker 1: in history, paying for your mail to be delivered has
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  Speaker 1: changed since the postal service began. Tell us a little
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  Speaker 1: history about the stamps and the postal service. No, I
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  Speaker 1: think that's one of the things that that I was
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  Speaker 1: fascinated by. You know what sort of led me want
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  Speaker 1: to write the book was that Pete, there was no
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  Speaker 1: home delivery for a long time. Everybody had to go
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  Speaker 1: to the post office to get them. Imagine what the
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  Speaker 1: lines were like then. I mean they're not so that,
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  Speaker 1: you know, they're pretty long now. But there's no home delivery,
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  Speaker 1: I guess, are very limited home delivery until the Civil
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  Speaker 1: War when Abraham Lincoln's Postmaster General, Montgomery Blair, he saw
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  Speaker 1: all these women, wives and girlfriends of soldiers just waiting
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  Speaker 1: and waiting for the post office for letters to come,
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  Speaker 1: and he just thought that that was wrong. So he
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  Speaker 1: started city delivery. And then and then John Wanamaker towards
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  Speaker 1: the end of the nineteenth century started pushing for rural
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  Speaker 1: free delivery, and and and that that uh that passed
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  Speaker 1: about a decade after you left. But but I guess
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  Speaker 1: all of those things are are relatively new, especially especially
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  Speaker 1: free rural delivery. For the longest time, people in uralaries
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  Speaker 1: still had to go to the post office even when
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  Speaker 1: there was home delivery in cities now, postal carriers used
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  Speaker 1: to make multiple deliveries a day. You say that in
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  Speaker 1: some places seven times a day, well, and there was
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  Speaker 1: there was at least twice a day delivery until uh nine,
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  Speaker 1: So for so from for most of the postal service
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  Speaker 1: history there were multiple deliveries a day. And in places
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  Speaker 1: like New York that you know there were as many
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  Speaker 1: as as seven deliveries. So no, it's just incredible. You
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  Speaker 1: just saw your your your mailman all the time, and
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  Speaker 1: you could send a letter in the morning and get
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  Speaker 1: a response in the afternoon. So who need the email?
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  Speaker 1: By law? You say, the US Postal Service has to
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  Speaker 1: visit every address in the country six days a week.
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  Speaker 1: Is that under threat? Well, it's under threat. It's sort
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  Speaker 1: of unsustainable because the problem is that the amount of
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  Speaker 1: mail is going down, but the number of addresses goes up.
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  Speaker 1: There are a million new addresses every year every time
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  Speaker 1: there's another housing development, and you know, that's a bunch
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  Speaker 1: of new mailboxes. So that's that's going to kill the
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  Speaker 1: Postal Service unless they unless they change they changed their
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  Speaker 1: business model, and they've been trying to do it, but
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  Speaker 1: Congressman left and so I just stand also that people
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  Speaker 1: trusted the postal Service so much that they actually sent
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  Speaker 1: their children through the postal system. I know that blows
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  Speaker 1: everybody's mind. No, I mean this was after after the
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  Speaker 1: Postal Service began delivering parcels, and that was in Uh.
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  Speaker 1: People just started sending all sorts of things to the
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  Speaker 1: mail just to see sort of you know, what they
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  Speaker 1: get away with. And there's some famous cases. A famous
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  Speaker 1: case in Idaho where the family sent there their young
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  Speaker 1: daughter May May Piersdorff was it was her name. Rather
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  Speaker 1: than buying a train ticket for it to go visit
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  Speaker 1: her grandmother, they went to the post office and paid
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  Speaker 1: fifty three cents uh to send her to sender in
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  Speaker 1: the mail the post the postmaster actually put the put
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  Speaker 1: the stance on her coat. They put on the train,
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  Speaker 1: and they took her to see her grandmother. And there
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  Speaker 1: you go, there you go. Devin Leonard, the author of
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  Speaker 1: the new book Neither Snow nor Rain, a History of
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  Speaker 1: the United States Postal Service. Bloomber Taking stock is brought
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