Will the mail still arrive six days a week? Will the government still be involved?
The Postal Service is facing big questions as it struggles to cope with rising costs and major changes in the way people communicate.
Nations' mail systems vary. England's Royal Mail, for example, is a government-owned business, while Germany's Deutsche Post is a publicly traded stock company. All are much smaller operations than the U.S. Postal Service, which handles more than 40 percent of the world's mail.
Few doubt there will be adjustments in the U.S., but what those will be remains to be seen.
In 1993, Postmaster General Marvin Runyon drew a barrage of criticism for suggesting mail delivery might be cut to four days a week.
That was a bombshell then, but it's something postal experts say may still be a possibility.
"If you have hard copy delivery, you might have it six days a week, or three days a week or one day a week," William Burrus, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said in an interview.
And, he added, it may not even be delivered; the recipient may have to go retrieve it.
Already, hiring private delivery contractors is an issue, prompting informational picketing by letter carriers in Florida to protest contracting out new routes in developing areas.
"I think within the next six to eight months the Congress of the United States is going to decide an issue that's going to determine whether or not we have a reliable, efficient postal service in the future," said William H. Young, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.
"What I'm referring to is the decision that's been made at the highest levels of the Postal Service to give all the new growth, and the new deliveries that are springing up, to private contractors," he said.
But such changes may be necessary, says Gene Del Polito, president of the American Association for Postal Commerce, which represents advertising mailers.
If the Postal Service is to survive, it will to have to consider outsourcing more of its activities, he said.
It's conceivable, Del Polito said, "that a postal system in the future could evolve into something which I would call the master contractor, where it maintains its government identity by the government being the master contractor but that it puts things out competitively on bid...."
"At the end of the day, what you need is a universal mail delivery system, you don't need a universal mail delivery enterprise," Del Polito said.
Burrus points out that "the world is changing dramatically in terms of instant communications. We as a species have discovered the ability to have instant communications. That's not consistent with hard copy. I would suspect that over time hard copy will play less and less of a role in our communications."
Not so sure is Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y., who believes hard copy will always have a place in the mailstream.
"Clearly, the way Americans communicate on a day-by-day basis is changing," he said, citing computers and cell phones. But there will still be core requirements such as hard copy that the post office will be needed for, said McHugh, a longtime congressional leader on postal issues.
Tony Conway, a longtime postal manager who now heads the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers, said he expects the Postal Service to "evolve, probably into more of a focus on the strength of the organization, which is its delivery network. That's the heart and soul of the organization, no current private carrier can compete with it."
But, he added, "it may or may not be a government organization."
"The $64,000 question is how to keep the delivery network affordable," Conway said, noting the decline of first-class mail.
