The World As We Know It Will Soon End (Part 1)

NO, NO . . . I'm not refering to the recent passage of the President's Health Care Reform Act. I'm saying that there are some things that we have had in the past that will not be there much longer. Some of these things might be saved, some will be saved, some shouldn't be saved, but only time will tell. Some will be gone in the next twenty years and with some it will take less time than that. Like 33 1/3, 45 and 78 RPM records, one day they were here and the next they were gone.

The first item is the Post Office. I don't know how long it will take or if it will ever really go away, but soon the price of mailing a letter will be so high that almost no one will do it anymore. I recently read in article in the paper stating that the PO will soon not be delivering mail on Saturday. Postal rates keep going up and service goes down and they expect to stay in business. In my opinion, that is not a good expectation. Soon the PO as we know it will be gone along with hand written letters.

The second item will be the Yellow Pages of the telephone book. The fact that more and more people are dropping their land lines in favor of the more convenient cell phones only will leave yellow pages and telephone books in general without much use. You might want to add dial-up internet service and answering machines in on the list of extinct services of the future having to do with owning a land line.

The third on my list is all things having to do with print news papers. They have been on the decline for several years now. Some have merged, some have just plain gone out of business but fewer people each month actually buy a newspaper. With that there will be almost no demand for classified adds in those newspapers, or newspaper advertising at all for that matter. And, without advertising there will be no more ink printed news.

Now most of what I've mentioned so far are things that were probably not much of a surprise, but there are more . . . much more to come. The next post will have to do with you doing without apples, apricots, grapes, plums, strawberries, olives, peanuts and soybeans. So make sure you follow my blog for the next post.