After nine years on the job, Postmaster General John E. Potter believes he has less than six months to convince Congress and the nation of the urgent need to retool the U.S. Postal Service for the
21st century, Ed O'Keefe reports.
A large part of Potter's mission is to change the service's business model by dropping Saturday deliveries, replacing post offices with outposts in suburban
supermarkets and cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs through attrition. But he's also looking for people within the service to come up with the next big idea.
"It wasn't somebody in
engineering who thought of Netflix. It was somebody that thought they could take a DVD and put it in the mail," he says. "Amazon.com wasn't a thought of by someone in the Postal Service."
Among partnerships with corporate America already in the works are new ads for Wal-Mart's mail-order pharmacy featuring the Postal Service and upcoming ads for "Toy Story 3" that incorporate the
Postal Service. Hallmark also plans to sell greeting cards that include envelopes with prepaid postage.
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