They're Going to Every House Anyway

I needed foam board and rubber cement.

Simple enough, right? I headed over to Hobby Lobby—a store that bills itself as one of the largest arts and crafts retailers in America, with tens of thousands of products for creative people. If you can't find rubber cement in a craft store, where exactly are you supposed to find it?

I found the foam board without much trouble. The rubber cement, however, was another story entirely.

After wandering the aisles for longer than I care to admit, I did what I swore I wouldn't do—I asked an employee. She looked at me with a genuinely puzzled expression and offered this pearl of wisdom:

I stared at her for a moment. "This IS a craft store," I replied, and walked away.

Undeterred, I made my way to the checkout counter and asked the cashier the same question. Same confused expression. Same answer: "Did you look in the craft section?"

I very nearly lost my mind. A manager was eventually summoned, who led me to the wrong place first, then consulted her cell phone, and finally—triumphantly—escorted me to the rubber cement.

In a craft store.

I drove home, went on Amazon, found a larger size of foam board than Hobby Lobby even carried, placed my order, and it was on my doorstep the next morning.

The Writing Is on the Wall—and Nobody's Reading It

That experience crystallized something I'd been sensing for a while but hadn't quite put into words: retail stores, as we know them, are finished. Not struggling. Not adjusting. Finished.

The math is brutally simple. Retailers cut costs by hiring cheaper, less trained workers. Those workers can't provide the one thing a physical store has over Amazon—knowledgeable, helpful human assistance. Customers have a frustrating experience and migrate online. Retailers lose revenue and cut costs further. Repeat until closure.

The employee who can't locate rubber cement in a craft store isn't just a funny story. She's a symptom of a dying model.

Amazon has become something genuinely unprecedented in the history of American commerce. You can find virtually anything in minutes, compare prices instantly, read thousands of reviews, and have it on your doorstep—often the next day, sometimes the same day. The experience isn't just more convenient than going to a store. For millions of Americans, it has become the default way they think about acquiring things.

This transformation is happening faster than most people realize, and the human cost—millions of retail jobs, disproportionately held by people without college degrees—is staggering and largely underdiscussed.

But here's where it gets interesting. Because Amazon isn't the only American institution being quietly rendered obsolete. There's another one that's been dying slowly for years, kept on life support by the federal government, delivering something almost nobody asked for.

Who's Getting the Mail These Days?

Greg Gutfeld put it more bluntly than most, observing that we've simply come to accept the daily ritual of bringing a fistful of unwanted paper inside, setting it on the kitchen table where it pretends to be important for a day or two, and then throwing it all away. His question: why do we keep bringing trash inside?

He's not wrong. Think about what actually arrives in your mailbox on a typical day. Advertisements. Casino offers. Fundraising appeals from organizations you donated to once years ago. Credit card solicitations. Grocery circulars for stores you don't shop at.

My wife and I hear regularly from our local casino—several times a week, in fact—and that accounts for about ninety percent of what we receive. The rest goes directly from the mailbox to the recycling bin, with a brief stop on the kitchen table where it pretends to be important for about forty-eight hours.

Nobody writes letters anymore. We pay bills online. We communicate by email and text. We sign and send documents electronically. The personal letter—once the backbone of the postal system—has gone the way of the telegram.

To add a certain poetic absurdity to the situation: it has been noted that the USPS lists itself as a financial supporter of NPR. The postal service—which loses billions annually—is underwriting public radio. One can only assume NPR's tote bags are particularly useful for hauling all that junk mail to the trash.

The Gallagher Solution

The late comedian Gallagher—famous for smashing watermelons and sharp observational humor about American life—had a bit years ago that I've never forgotten. Riffing on the Mormon tradition of door-to-door missionary work, he suggested that Mormons should deliver the mail. His reasoning was characteristically simple: they're going to every house in the neighborhood anyway.

It was a funny joke. But applied to Amazon in 2026, it stops being a joke entirely and starts sounding like actual policy.

Amazon already delivers to virtually every address in America, nearly every day. Their logistics network—planes, trucks, vans, and an army of independent delivery contractors—is one of the most sophisticated distribution systems ever built. In many areas, Amazon drivers are more reliably present than postal carriers.

So here's the question nobody in Washington seems to be asking: Why are we spending $89 billion a year on a parallel delivery infrastructure that's hemorrhaging money, when a private company is already doing the job better, faster, and without a taxpayer backstop?

Contract it out. Let Amazon deliver the mail. Give them the universal service obligation as a contractual requirement—every address, every day—and let the market do what markets actually do well. The postal workers who remain could be transitioned. The deficit disappears. And the rest of us can stop bringing crap inside just to throw it away.

A Serious Note to End On

I want to be clear that I'm genuinely sympathetic to the hundreds of thousands of people who work for the postal service, just as I'm sympathetic to the millions employed by Hobby Lobby and retail stores across the country. These are real people with real families, and the disruption coming their way is not their fault.

But sympathy doesn't change the math. And perhaps the clearest summary of where we actually stand is this:

That's not a conservative argument or a liberal argument. It's just an honest one.

We are borrowing billions of dollars we don't have to maintain a system built for a world that no longer exists—while the private sector has already built its replacement and is running it profitably, right to your front door.