Once the United States Postal Service was created, it was important to Americans because they needed a way to deliver messages over long distances fast. After Benjamin Franklin was postmaster general, his system to deliver mail was still used and made more Americans want to use it. By 1831, “the United States boasted twice as many post offices as Britain and five times as many as France” (Gallagher). “Today, the United States has over 40,000 post offices and the postal service delivers 212 billion pieces of mail each year to over 144 million homes and businesses in the United States, Puerto Rico, Guam, the American Virgin Islands and American Samoa.”(Mullen).