Thanks to spotty service by the USPS, I have started to migrate our snail mail services to digital-only. I’m doing so belatedly, perhaps, but certainly with a little bit of anger and a lot of sadness.

We don’t like in some far-flung rural area; rather, we’re smack dab in the middle of downtown Chicago, so there are no mountains or rivers to cross in order to get from the nearest post office to us.

Yet we can go three or four weekdays in which no mail gets delivered.

This has at least two implications for us, one a nuisance and the other more substantive. The nuisance is that magazines get out of date before they arrive (and we get a stack of them at one time). The substantive problem is that I no longer trust that necessary comms will arrive, let alone do so in a timely manner.

Like I said about being late to the game, it probably makes sense to forego paper versions of credit card statements, and I will never again have to risk having some important communication “get lost” on its way to us.

But I was (and am) a fan of reading on paper and not from a glowing screen. This is a conversion that I didn’t want to embrace and it will take time to get used to it.

Also, I’m learning that on the media subscription front, that many of the pubs we receive are happy to switch to digital-only without reflecting that simplified delivery mechanism in a lower price.

So, our mail delivery declines as the publishers’ margins increase.

If I were a conspiracy theorist…