The United States Post Office announced last month that they were planning to close 3700 post offices nationwide. For many years the post office has floated large lists of post office closings only to back off at the last moment and close considerably fewer than were on the original list. Still, given the decline in postal volume (and the anticipation of continuing declines) most of these post offices will eventually be closed. In 1900, the USPS operated 75000 post offices. Today, with a population of over three times what it was a hundred years ago, the post office operates 34000, and is planning to close about 10% of these. For stamp collectors, the closing of post offices and the decline of the philatelic role that post offices played has been another difficulty that our hobby has had attracting young collectors. There are certain paradigms in our hobby that are believed by all, which have strong anecdotal evidence, and yet which have never been studied or proven or even carefully evaluated. Perhaps the greatest of these is that what could be called the morphology of the collector base-that big collectors proceed from little collectors and if we don’t have a large number of children collecting stamps then our hobby is doomed (for where will the grown up collectors come from?) Perhaps this is true, but it is significant that the nations in which stamp collecting has had the greatest growth in the last thirty years- China and Japan- these collectors largely came into the hobby as adults without first going through the larval stage. Still, many young American collectors got their start buying stamps at their local post office (I know I did) and while the decline of the philatelic function of the local post office may not portend doom for philately, it is probably not a good sign.
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