Closing Hickory facility will cost Postal Service more

The U.S. Postal Service is “testing the feasibility” of moving operations from the Hickory Processing and Distribution Facility to a similar location in Greensboro to improve, they say, operational efficiency and service.

The problem is, the experiment started last year with some services being routed from Hickory to Greensboro, and there have already been delays and complaints from numerous customers, residential and commercial.

Conover’s City Manager Donald Duncan expressed his concerns in a Feb. 14 article in the Hickory Daily Record. He said that since bulk mail processing was moved from Hickory to Greensboro, “We’ve had some residents who have lived at the same address for 20 years getting their bills returned as undeliverable.” In fact, undeliverable mail – mostly utility bills – has gone from a few per month to around five per day since Greensboro has taken over.

Speeding up and expanding the process of “outsourcing” from Hickory to Greensboro will only add to the problem.

I use the word outsourcing because I happen to be somewhat of an expert on the subject, having lived through the outsourcing of furniture industry jobs for the past decade in this state. What looked like an implosion and destruction of an entire industry to the casual observer was actually a shrewd move by the owners of those companies to take advantage of actual tax incentives by the U.S. government to move those jobs overseas where wages are so much lower than here and the environmental regulations they face are so much weaker, or actually non-existent.

Those were the motives of the furniture company owners to move their operations (or outsource) – profit and some might say greed. But what is driving officials of the US Postal Services to ignore the facts and plow ahead with their plans to make these changes – despite the failures of the plan so far? USPS spokesperson Enola Rice said in a recent Hickory Daily Record news story (Sunday, Feb. 13, 2011), “No decision has been made at all. If we find out we’re not going to save any money or service will suffer, we’re not going to do it.”

But others see it as a foregone conclusion that this feasibility study is only window dressing for a decision that’s already been made to go through with it – to put more people out of work or force them to sell their homes in order to move to another facility. This is a region that’s already seen more than its fair share of unemployment, shattered dreams and upheaval. As many as 200 jobs may be affected – not to mention those of the spouses that may be forced to relocate as well.

Where is the fairness or logic in this plan? The Hickory Processing and Distribution Plant won more than nine awards in 2008 for their hard work – two of which were for being No. 1 in the entire nation in terms of efficiency and on-time performance. Maybe that’s it – the Greensboro team didn’t have those numbers. Hickory was making them look bad!

It could be that the American dream that hard work and diligence will eventually result in well-deserved success is dying. But we’d like to ask for your help in keeping it alive for just a little bit longer, here where too many people have suffered too much already. Experts are saying the economy will bounce back sooner or later, the way it always does. Let’s not take the short-sighted approach that might save us money now, but leave us unprepared and over-extended in too few post offices and distribution facilities to handle the load when things get better.

Help by speaking out against the move to close down the Hickory Processing & Distribution Center and moving operations to Greensboro. It’s a bad idea and will end up costing the Postal Service more, not less, money to implement.

Roger R. Racine

Hudson