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OK, I'LL ADMIT IT: I'M A postal nut. The first thing I do every day to tap into the latest buzz is search the Web for postal news from around the world to add to the Association for Postal Commerce's Web site (www.postcom.org).

Anyone who follows those entries probably has noticed that recently there's been a flurry of stories about the declining quality of postal services, mostly in the West and Southwest, but also in the Midwest and on the Gulf Coast.

Mailers say they clearly see service problems. Officials at the U.S. Postal Service say they see nothing of the sort, and declare that mail service has never been better. This means that either mailers are seeing something that doesn't exist, or the USPS has gone blind. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

But where? How can one ever hope to know whether mail service is good or bad without having some metric to measure it against?

And that's the rub. When you really get down to it, the USPS consistently monitors service for stamped, mailbox-entered first class mail and single-piece Priority Mail, and that's about it. It doesn't have measurement systems for the lion's share of the pieces it carries. No service performance guidelines exist for periodical or standard mail. There aren't any for bound printed matter or media mail. And the USPS simply fails to report on the quality of first class service on items that carry a meter imprint or a printed indicia.

This makes you wonder: How does the governing board of an enterprise that has “postal service” as its name not demand some accountability of the USPS' core performance? How will it ever know whether service is good or bad, improving or deteriorating, without an effective monitoring scheme in place and without firm, public declarations of what any buyer of these services can reasonably expect?

So who is or isn't seeing what out there? Apparently, there never will be any real answer as long as the blind keep leading the blind.

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GENE A. DEL POLITO is president of the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) in Arlington, VA.