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Gold Standard Consulting
Gold Standard Consulting Gold Standard Journal

Jul 3, 2026 · 5 min read

Two Hundred Fifty

Founded in 2018 and led by Leah Goldblum, Founder & Creative Director.

I have been quiet since March. Here is the short version: I finished my Master’s at UW-Madison in May, rebuilt my portfolio from the studs, and shipped a civic data project called SaveUSPS. The long version is the rest of this post, but I did not want to come back with an apology. I wanted to come back with something worth reading.

Today is the country’s 250th birthday. The semiquincentennial, if you want the word that costs more to say than to spell. And because I have spent the last few months elbow-deep in postal data, I want to tell you the thing that stuck with me most: the post office is older than the country it serves.

On July 26, 1775, almost a full year before the Declaration of Independence, the Second Continental Congress created a national postal system and named Benjamin Franklin the first Postmaster General. His salary was $1,000, roughly $33,500 in today’s money, and he was told to build post routes from Falmouth, Massachusetts (now Portland, Maine) down to Savannah, Georgia. Franklin was not a random pick. The British Crown had made him joint postmaster general of the colonies back in 1753, then fired him in 1774 for being too sympathetic to the revolution. The Crown’s loss was the revolution’s logistics department.

The framers thought the mail mattered enough to write it into the founding document. Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 gives Congress the power “to establish Post Offices and post Roads.” That is it. Seven words, sitting in the Constitution right next to the power to coin money and regulate commerce. Madison and Jefferson argued for cheap or even free delivery of newspapers, because they saw the postal network as the nervous system of a self-governing public. The Post Office Act of 1792 formalized the network and set uniform rates.

The part I find genuinely moving is rural free delivery. For most of the 1800s, if you lived on a farm, you traveled into town to collect your mail, sometimes only every few weeks. Rural free delivery started as an experiment on October 1, 1896, out of post offices in West Virginia. Within a year, 44 routes were running in 29 states. The number of rural carriers went from fewer than 500 in 1899 to more than 32,000 by 1905. Parcel post arrived in 1913 and suddenly a farmer could order from a catalog and have it delivered to a box at the end of the lane. That is the moment mail order became a way of life, and it is a direct ancestor of the “add to cart” button I help clients design.

Now the scale today, which is the part that stops people cold. In fiscal year 2025, the Postal Service delivered to 170.4 million delivery points. It ran 30,972 retail offices and maintained 236,347 delivery routes. It operated 262,740 vehicles, one of the largest civilian fleets in the world. Its own Postal Facts sheet puts it flatly: “If it were a private sector company, the Postal Service would rank 55th in the 2025 Fortune 500.” Its retail footprint is larger than that of Subway, Dollar General, Starbucks, and McDonald’s. And it does this six days a week, to nearly every address in America, generally without tax dollars for operating expenses.

The finances are harder. In fiscal year 2025, USPS reported operating revenue of $80.5 billion and a net loss of $9.0 billion under standard accounting, an improvement from the $9.5 billion loss the year before. Total mail volume was 108.7 billion pieces, down 3.3 percent, with First-Class Mail volume down 5 percent. Postmaster General David Steiner, who took the job in July 2025, put it plainly in the November results: “the occasional appearance of financial progress, such as our profitable first quarter, is far outweighed by the reality of our significant systemic annual revenue and cost imbalance.” The agency is midway through a ten-year modernization plan called Delivering for America. I am going to stay out of the politics of that plan, because reasonable people disagree and the numbers are contested enough on their own.

That tension, a beloved institution that is structurally expensive to run, is exactly what pulled me into building SaveUSPS. It is a solo project that projects USPS solvency through 2030 across all 50 states, built on a 47-source evidence base. I wanted to see whether I could make something dry and enormous feel legible in one screen. That work is why this journal went dark from March through July. I will write the design story of it in a couple weeks.

The Postal Service noticed its own birthday, by the way. Its 250th predates the country’s by almost exactly a year, and it has leaned into both. In July 2025 it issued the “250 Years of Delivering” stamps, a pane of 20 by cartoonist Chris Ware showing a carrier’s route through four seasons. This year it released “American Icons,” 13 stamps curated by Ralph Lauren, and “Figures of the American Revolution.” On July 4, 2026, in Philadelphia, at the B. Free Franklin Post Office inside Independence National Historical Park, it dedicated the Declaration of Independence Forever stamp. It even wrapped 30 collection boxes in cities tied to the founding. I find something perfect about the fact that the agency’s marketing department and its actuarial reality are both true at once.

Here is my confession about the silence. Two finished entries from March never went live because of a bug in my own publishing pipeline. They sat on my hard drive for four months while I told myself the blog was “on hold.” They are up now. Consider it archaeology. The lesson, which I clearly needed to relearn, is that the tool you built to remove friction can become the friction.

So: I am back. Twice a month, on schedule. The next entry, already written, is about why the AI boom you are living through runs on a physical component most people have never heard of. After that, the design story of SaveUSPS. Thanks for still being here after the long gap. The mail always comes eventually.

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