A faster, easier P.O.

Postal clerks replaced, helped by technology

A recent caller to The Courier News' 411 line asked, "No matter which location I go to for post office services, there is always a long line. How many actual teller windows have we increased to go along with the population since the new (Elgin) post office was built downtown? How many windows have we actually gained and how much has the population grown?"

Elgin Postmaster Mike Mayes would start answering that question with a question of his own: "Are you sure you need to go to a post office clerk at all?"

The age of automation and convenience has come to the Postal Service just as it has to private industry. Behind the scenes, human sorters used to have to eyeball every letter's address and, based on an astounding memory, throw it into the correct bin or slot. Now, Mayes says, 82 percent to 89 percent of letters have their addresses read in a fraction of a second by a mechanical reader attached to a computer, which then stacks all the letters in the order a letter carrier will come to each home or business.

Now that effort to use mechanical brain power to save costs and increase efficiency has extended into the post office's lobby, too.

While more and more service windows go unmanned, the Postal Service offers customers an array of new ways to buy stamps and mail letters and packages.

The numbers game

Let's begin with the caller's question about numbers: The present downtown post office in the Elgin Civic Center was built in 1966, replacing a stone building that had been erected in 1902 where Carleton Rogers Park is now on Spring Street. The 1960 census counted 49,447 people in Elgin. By 2006, city officials estimated the population at 101,903. So the city has twice as many people as when the new post office opened.

No one still working at the Elgin post offices was around during the Spring Street days. But retired Elgin postmaster William Ryan, who joined the staff about two weeks after the move to the Civic Center, believes the old one had about three service windows. The new downtown post office has six cashier stations.

One also must remember that a second, west-side Elgin post office opened on Randall Road during the 1980s. It has three cashier stations plus a cash register where customers can buy commemorative stamps and stamp-collecting items.

So while the population has doubled, the sheer number of cashier stations in Elgin has more than doubled, from about three to nine.

On the other hand, Mayes admits, not all those stations always have somebody manning them anymore. "Most of the time we have three or four clerks" on duty downtown, he said. "We haven't had all six for a long time." The Randall Road office usually does have all three stations manned, he said.

Hello, APC

However, as a customer enters the downtown post office, he or she now is usually approached by a greeter -- yes, a real human -- who asks what the customer needs. Many customers now come wanting to get a passport, Mayes notes, and the greeter sends them to the right place through a door and down a hall. If the person wants only to buy stamps or to mail something uncomplicated, the greeter will try to steer him or her to the postal clerk of the future. It's a little machine along the lobby wall, the size of a copying machine, called an Automated Postal Center, or APC. Randall Road and most other post offices also now come with APCs.

Asking a series of questions that the customer answers by touching parts of its TV-style screen, "an Automated Postal Center can do most of the things you used to need a clerk for," said Tim Ratliff, media spokesman for the Postal Service in the west-suburban area. "You can buy a book of stamps; get ZIP Code information; weigh a package, figure how much postage it needs and buy that postage; and find out how long it will take for your letter or package to reach its destination."

The only downsides: APCs take only credit or debit cards, not cash. And while the machines are available longer than the human cashiers, and can be accessed 24 hours a day at Randall Road, the downtown APC is incommunicado while that post office's lobby is locked overnight.

And that's not all a customer can do to keep away from the clerk, Ratliff says:

• Using "Click 'n' Ship" at www.usps.com, you can use a debit or credit card to buy stamps or print out postage that can be attached to a package.

• Using www.usps.com or 1-800-ASKUSPS, you then can arrange to have a real human pick up your package from your home or business.

• Outgoing letters can be left in your mailbox for pickup by your carrier.

• You can order stamps by phone at 1-800-STAMP24, paying with a credit or debit card and having them delivered to your home -- by mail, of course.

• You can order stamps through the mail.

• You can buy books of stamps at stores like Jewel-Osco while checking out your groceries. And even if you do end up at the old cashier window, you'll find the person there working faster than the ones at the old stone post office, Ryan says.

"In the old days, they'd have to compute the postage manually," says the retired postmaster, who still lives in Elgin and drives a school bus. "If a package was going to some foreign country, they'd have to pull out a book and look up what the rates and rules were for shipping to that country. Now all they have to do is punch some buttons and a computer answers all those questions."