My 4-year-old grandson knows how to negotiate. Experience has taught him that he is more likely to end up with two new toys if he first asks for four.

U.S. Postal Service officials haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be a kid. They do the same thing when asking the Postal Rate Commission for rate hikes.

However, there is a difference. My grandson is cute and I love him even when he outwits me. But nothing can make me like anything about the USPS asking for a 30 percent rate increase while counting on me to feel as if I’ve won if they eventually get half or even only a third of what they requested.

If the USPS actually gets what it’s asking for, beginning in mid-2007 it would cost an average of 25 percent more to mail newspapers to in-county subscribers. For some publishers, the price hike would be as high as 30 percent.

This is part of the same rate case that would take first-class stamps to 42 cents next year.

But that isn’t the worst news coming out of the USPS in regard to our business and you as our customer. If they can’t chase us away with rates, they appear determined to do it with policy. In the name of automation, they want to impose standards that would force out of the mail stream products the shape of a newspaper, or at least force our local papers to leave the local post office to be sorted elsewhere before coming back to the local post office for delivery.

Gone would be same-day local delivery. We might not even get second-day delivery locally. On top of that, they and we would be spending more money to make service slower.

Local postal officials recognize a customer when they see one and they know how to take care of customers. We have terrific experiences with local post offices. They know us and they know you and they want both of us to be served. I see it-and I appreciate it-every single week.

And we get terrific cooperation from folks at the Springfield Sectional Center, where they have demonstrated a genuine interest in making things work better for all of us. Hopefully, all of our out-of-state subscribers are seeing quicker delivery most recently as a result of some of those efforts.

Unfortunately, it must make too much sense for people at the local level to actually be trying to win customer support with good service, because the people at the top seem determined to react to a declining customer base by driving more customers away.

Indeed the postal service is losing customers at the same time its mandated service area is expanding. That’s not a good position in which to be, and I agree that changes must occur. But driving away more customers is not part of the answer.

The fight is long from over. It’s going to cost our industry a lot of money to prove to postal officials that they are making a profit on the business we do with them and that driving away a profitable customer base, especially one that has been at their side in trying to win Congressional and White House approval on some key funding issues, is not the right answer.

Therein is another apparent difference between my grandson and the USPS brass. He knows where cash comes from and he knows how to keep it flowing his way.