Pitney Bowes, Maker of Postage Machines, Believes in Life After Mail
How a staid, century-old postage machine business plans to win a digital "knife fight."
This article is for subscribers only.
Blockbuster Video, Eastman Kodak, RadioShack: If you make most of your money on postage meters in 2015, you have to hustle to keep your company's name off that list. Maybe it's a good thing that Pitney Bowes isn't quite a household name.
For almost a century now, the Stamford (Conn.) company has been in the business of postage meters, which look kind of like primitive fax machines with attached scales. Pitney Bowes also handles the sorting for the U.S. Postal Service, processing some 15 billion pieces of mail every year. The focus on snail mail is an obvious problem in the age of Snapchat, and Pitney Bowes knows it. There's no way to ignore the 27 percent drop in envelopes and catalogues sent by mail in the past decade.