The National Association of Letter Carriers apparently has a retirement community for former mail carriers—and a hypocritical one at that.
The union has long opposed phasing out door-to-door delivery, even though in many instances, delivering mail to a centralized location would make the Postal Service more efficient and less wasteful. “Ending door-to-door for tens of millions of Americans would particularly harm small businesses, as well as the elderly and people who live in areas with extreme weather,” the union’s president said last year.
But at the union’s retirement community—which is in hurricane-prone Florida, and which serves aging retirees– mail is delivered to a centralized location.
One guide for Florida retirees writes, “There is no mail delivery in Nalcrest because apparently none of the residents want to bother with carrying letters anymore.”
Nevertheless, as the Wall Street Journal reported a few years ago, the community still seeks to serve the union agenda elsewhere:
There is heavy pressure in Nalcrest, a rambling retirement community that is its own little town, to use the U.S. mail, rather than email or competing shipping companies, to pay bills and mail parcels to the grandkids. “We say…it’s got to come through the U.S. mail or we don’t want it here,” said Matty Rose, 67 years old, manager of Nalcrest.
… Shipping by United Parcel Service Inc., or FedEx Corp. is frowned upon. “Never used them,” said Greg Stratton, a tanned and bearded retired mailman from Sauk Prairie, Wis., as he bought stamps.
Email? “Nope,” he said. Write letters? “Yep.”
— Jillian Kay Melchior is a Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow for the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.