What the Postal Service calls its ”Stores of the Future” have made their debut in St. Louis.
The first Postal Store in the Midwest opened in January at South County Shopping Center in south St. Louis County. The second opened April 6 in Alton, Mo. Two more are scheduled to open next month.
The stores put a new package around some familiar post-office services.
What`s different?
– No ”Please Take A Number” machine.
– Clerks who don`t have to stay behind a counter.
– More opportunities for customers to help themselves.
– Longer hours. (They`re open on Sunday afternoons and most holidays.)
”We`ve heard for years that our customers have wanted more retail-friendly outlets,” said Richard Watkins, a spokesman for the Postal Service in St. Louis. The new stores were designed to be just that, he said.
Test-marketing of the stores began about two years ago in the Washington area, he said. The nation has about 25 in operation.
The Postal Service`s ultimate goal is to have 10,000 such stores by 2000, Watkins said.
New construction of post offices and remodelings will incorporate the design. The agency has about 40,000 locations across the country.
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Postal Stores resemble post offices and function as such, but they are designed with bright lighting, open spaces, and red, white and blue decor. They sell packaging, stamps, envelopes and gifts, and they rent post-office boxes.
Shoppers ”will rarely see a line” at Postal Stores, Watkins said, because customers can handle most of their mailing themselves with electronic scales and postage vending machines at their disposal.
Sales of stamp-collecting items have gone up dramatically wherever Postal Stores have been set up, Watkins said, mainly because every product offered is on display. ”What we`ve done is made people look at these items,” Watkins said. At a traditional post office, customers would have to ask for them.
Revenue from stamp-collection items is up as high as 2,000 percent in some areas of country, thanks to the Postal Stores, Watkins said. In St. Louis, he added, that revenue is up by 30 percent, compared with last year, since the South County Postal Store opened.
Watkins said another sign of the stores` success is that no clerk who has gone to work at a Postal Store nationwide has yet asked to be reassigned.
Taking away the counter and the bars that once stood between postal clerks and their customers has resulted in ”a more relaxed, open environment, and our people are happier,” Watkins said.
”And where you`ve got happier employees, you`ve got committed employees- and happier customers,” he said.
As proof, he pointed to research conducted for the Postal Service by Opinion Research Corp. of Princeton, N.J. ”Our customer-satisfaction scores have increased,” he said. ”That`s very encouraging.”