Two years ago, when we had a receptionist in those pre recession days, one of her jobs was to keep the office postage meter going. It took about six months after she had left for the meter to run out of funds. By that time, our relationship with the postage meter had changed. We no longer considered it mission critical. It wasn’t that many years ago that we sent out regular mailings to our clients and customers via snail mail. Now it’s all done via email.
The now disabled postage meter sat unfunded. When we moved our offices back in July it was placed in a box. Three months later it’s still in that box and will remain. It’s not really ours either, it belongs to Pitney Bowes and now that we aren’t using it they would like to have it back. They can have it.
I wonder how many other companies are sending their meters back to Mr. Pitney. I can easily imagine a warehouse filling up with returned postage machines as the volume of US Mail has declined from over 200 billion pieces of mail annually in 2005 to approximately 175 billion pieces of mail this year. The Kiplinger Letter predicts that this will drop to about 160 billion pieces of mail in 2015.
In other words, it’s not exactly a growth industry.
