MOSES LAKE — Phil Bilodeau said he wants his customers to know he appreciated their business.

Bilodeau retired Friday after 30 years with the U.S. Postal Service, most of them at the customer counter at the Moses Lake Post Office.

“I just want to thank the people that supported me here. All the nice friends that I’ve met through the years,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed the people, I’ve enjoyed the job.”

The USPS is Bilodeau’s second career. He worked in retail before taking the post office job at 40 years of age.

“I started in the back, I worked mail in the back. And then there was a vacancy on the window, and I moved up there,” he said.

Being a postal clerk and being a letter carrier are two different career tracks, he said.

“I never was a carrier. They’re two different crafts, two different responsibilities. The carriers deliver mail and the clerks sort the mail. (The clerks) do the processing,” he said.

Time and technology have brought a lot of changes to the job, he said.

“When I started here in 1993 everything was done manually. There wasn’t much automation - we had to sort mail by hand,” he said. “The percentage (of letters) was higher than it is nowadays. So there were a lot more letters and a lot fewer packages.”

“So you processed and sent all the mail over to the carriers, and they took it out and delivered it. That was the daily process, six days a week,” he said.

That was then, and it’s different now. Among other things, most mail is sorted by machines.

“Automation has changed things considerably. The internet has completely changed how people mail and how they correspond with each other,” he said.

The rise of email, texting and social media on the one hand, and online commerce on the other, mean the volume of letters has gone down and the amount of packages delivered has gone up.

“We’re bigger, heavier on parcels,” he said.

Other things have changed too.

“When I started here, Bill Clinton was president and the price of a stamp was 29 cents,” he said.

A friend told him about the USPS entrance exam and urged him to take it, he said. As a guy with a couple of kids he wanted a job with a steady income, he said. But he still hesitated a little.

“I almost didn’t take the exam. My wife talked me into it,” Bilodeau said.

Once he was hired, then-Moses Lake postmaster Carroll Huff told him there were advantages to a post office career.

“He convinced me I was probably going to make more money than I ever had and (could) start a good retirement,” he said.

Ensuring an adequate retirement income was one reason he stayed a few extra years, he said. But there was also the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and, in Bilodeau’s opinion, the need to stay on the job during the emergency.

“I wanted to serve the community, and make sure people had their mail and packages,” he said.

People depended on the USPS for crucial items like medication, he said, and they still do.

“It’s still really important to people because some people don’t have access to the internet,” he said. “‘So we have to have manual deliveries.”

It turned out that the former postmaster was right - the post office has been a good career, he said.

“I’ve always enjoyed my job here. I support the post office and ask that others do the same,” he said. “They’re going through a lot of changes right now. Technology is changing things rapidly, and they’re always condensing things and trying to make it a better service for people. We just appreciate your patience with that.”

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.