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Cash, Please: Postal Service decided against local automated centers
Journal Photo by Lauren Carroll
Hank Marsh waits to mail his tax return at the post office's Ardmore Station. The line extended out the door less than an hour before closing time.
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Published: April 16, 2009
Special hours and special service on April 15 from your friendly neighborhood post office have pretty much gone the way of milk delivery--a product of changing consumer habits, the recession and new ways of doing business.
In Winston-Salem, the one piece of new technology that could speed the mailing of tax returns has passed the city by.
True to Winston-Salem's traditional image, its postal customers prefer cash to credit and debit cards.
And so, three or four years ago when the Postal Service was deciding where to put automated postal centers, it went to Burlington and Kernersville, but not to Winston-Salem, said Carl Walton, a spokesman for the postal service in Greensboro.
"I was kind of scratching my head when I saw that, too," Walton said. "I guess it's the nature of the customers that come in."
Helen Steen, 76, who was mailing her tax returns at the Miller Street post office yesterday, exemplifies the traditional postal-service customer.
She does not use debit cards, she said, because she worries about identity theft.
And she doesn't mind coming by the post office to mail her returns.
"I personally come in to make sure it gets there," she said.
It may be awhile before Winston-Salem gets an automated center of its own, Walton said. The recession makes it hard to predict when the next wave of postal centers will come.
"Now we're struggling financially like so many companies," he said.
Financial struggles also led the post office to cancel a longstanding tradition last year: staying open into the night.
A few contract post offices stayed open a little longer than their regular 5 p.m. closing, but nothing like in the past when post offices were open until at least 9 p.m. And with the number of people filing online, use of the post office for mailing tax forms has dropped, he said.
"We were almost enabling procrastinators," Walton said. "I guess it's one of those traditions that when you look at it, you ask, ‘Why were we doing it?'"
The Rev. Mike Simpson, a senior minister at First Christian Church, said that he usually files online, but he had to make a last-minute addition to one of his daughter's tax forms so he dropped by the Miller Street post office to mail it.
He said he remembers the days when a postal employee would stand on the sidewalk to accept tax returns from customers, and when the post offices would stay open late. Though he appreciates those days, it set an unrealistic standard for customer service.
"They were enabling our bad behavior," he said. "We don't do that in business, but we expect the government to cut us some slack."
■ Mary Giunca can be reached at 727-4089 or at mgiunca@wsjournal.com.
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