Usamah “Sam” Husseini

POST MASTER GENERAL DONAHOE: "There is a very bright future out there. You can't limit yourself with what you're doing now. You got to keep it wide. You got to keep it flexible. And that's why we are asking for flexibility of product pricing going into the future." 

SAM HUSSEINI: "You talk about expanding and that you haven't cut back, but you have been criticized for precisely doing that. The office inspector general has recommended pilot projects for non-bank financial services. Ralph Nader has excoriated you for not following up on Ruth Goldman's -- the Postal Regulatory Commission chairperson -- put out two dozen recommendations for not apparently following up on them. How many of those have you followed up on? On the other side, selling off post offices. You have the Living New Deal project called "Bank Heist with No Cop on the Beat" in the open that these historic places with new deal architecture and art are being sold off to real estate companies. How do you respond to that?"

DONAHOE: "Sure. I think again the key thing to any success stories is to work within their core. We don't know anything about banking. I mean we would be perfectly interested in talking to somebody that comes in that would like to use the facility to accept a deposit, but to set a bank system from one bank to lend money to another bank. We don't know anything about that."

HUSSEINI: "You don't know anything about groceries either." [He had talked about getting groceries to people earlier.]

DONAHOE: "We know a lot about delivery. We're the best delivery company in this world. That's what we know. We know more about delivery than anybody. We know how to get things to a person's house. We know how to get where ever they live, we know how to get groceries stocked fresh and cold and we know how to do that. That's where our core is; it's in delivery. From our selling perspective, we don't need that. We have buildings in many of these places. As people move away to pay bills online and that's smart. It's free. It's convenient. Without $14.5 billion a year coming into the offers in terms of bill payment in the man [sic] vs. bill payment, you got to make some tough decisions. 

"If you knew a lot about me, you would know that I am fanatical about our old buildings. I spent a lot of money in this postal service over the years to maintain, update, and to keep a lot of our old facilities. When you have one building across the street from another, you have to make tough decisions. And in many cases, what we have been able to do is to take those buildings to sell them off to people who have been able to re-employ them and reuse them in a public manner. The Berkeley office would have been a great sale. They were proposing to put in a hardware store, a coffee shop, and a couple of other things. Maintaining an old post office when we have something right up the street makes no sense, and that's what you have to do when you're going forward. That's the whole idea of short sidedness [sic] vs. the long approach. We certainly, again, take our role and responsibility [noise] that our role is delivery. Our role is retail. Again, from the retail perspective, we've invited many people to come in and we are starting to work with them. We are using our retail and delivery as ways to expand our business in the future. To step into more inquiries especially whenever you go out into this competitive world today. Money is one thing, but grey matter and the ability to concentrate on doing more than three or four things really good in any company, we are hard pressed."