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US Postal Service Discontinuing Saturday Mail Delivery
Hugh Pickens writes "The Postal Service has been losing billions of dollars each year as Americans increasingly rely on online communications that drive down mail volumes. Now, Reuters reports that the Postal Service plans to drop Saturday delivery of first-class mail by August, saving $2 billion per year. 'The Postal Service is advancing an important new approach to delivery that reflects the strong growth of our package business and responds to the financial realities resulting from America's changing mailing habits,' says Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe. But the Postal Service is already facing some pushback for moving forward with delivery schedule changes. 'Today's announcement by Postmaster General Donahoe to eliminate six-day delivery is yet another death knell for the quality service provided by the U.S. Postal Service,' says Jeanette Dwyer, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers' Association. 'To erode this service will undermine the Postal Service's core mission and is completely unacceptable.' Package deliveries will continue under the new plan and were a bright spot in a bleak 2012 fiscal year, with package revenue rising 8.7 percent during the year. Donahoe says the changes would allow the Postal Service to continue benefiting from rising package deliveries as Americans order more products from sites such as eBay Inc and Amazon.com Inc."
Err - that's the plan. Only first class mail is being stopped on Saturdays. If you want something delivered on a Saturday, you can still send it priority or express, and it will still be delivered on a Saturday. That's the second and eighth lines of the summary above.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The usps was set up by the govt, it didnt go asking for funds. Jackass.
Preparing to get a Wooosh! but Article 1, Section 8, Clause 7. The enumerated powers of the Federal Government include establishing Post Offices. Same section establishes paying for a Navy. The privatization of the postal service was either a delegation or abrogation of the responsibilties of Congress, depending if you take your politics straight or with soda. I'm in the abrogation camp, myself.
Do what they do in Canada. Place your "Post-Office" inside a pharmacy, and staff it as long as the pharmacy is open (usually pretty late). The staff of the post office is actually the staff of the pharmacy, who can do things like stock shelves during the times when nobody needs the post office services. The post office pays the pharmacy to run the service, but still saves a bunch of money, because they don't have to rent their own space, and pay employees full time when most of the time there's nothing for them to do.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Well, some of us actually read the whole summary, and thus see that Saturday package deliveries aren't being cut out. So it's not going to affect getting packages at all.
https://www.catalogchoice.org/ - I've been using the free part of the service for a while now and I get vastly less junk mail than I used to. Not having the extra volume to deal with is worth the time it takes to use the website.
That means someone in a cabin that is a 10 mile boat-ride - the post office does this sort of stuff.
No they don't. You don't have to be too far off the beaten track to require that your mail be picked up at the post office. You haven't lived in a rural area before, have you?
I did http://www.optoutprescreen.com/ and it stopped the majority of the most annoying junk mail. The kind that might let someone start a credit card in my name if they intercept it....
More options are here: http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicited-mail-phone-calls-and-email
I have yet to try dmachoice, has anyone tried it?
Part of the problem is that the 1st class mail is being used to subsidize bulk mail and as a result as 1st class mail gets sent less and less the subsidy has become insufficient to cover the cost.
Ooops, you got that backwards. Bulk Mail prices subsidize first class delivery. But other than that, yes I agree that the prices on bulk mail should go up.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
What? Really? All I can say is finally! Waaaaaaaaaayyy less junk mail will get to me and everyone else now (99% of mail I get is junk -- goes right from my mail box straight into the recycling) Sure, there's probably some poor people who depend on this extra day of mail (I know we kinda did as I was growing up), but too bad...
What the......?
This only means that a larger chunk of mail (AND junk mail) will arrive on Monday now.
Need some coffee?
No, but they could die (or at least suffer harm) if the mail was something like insulin or heart medication.
Merrly being snarky does not make a convincing argument.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/06/16869665-wait-a-minute-mr-postman-new-mail-delivery-schedule-raises-eyebrows?lite
The Postmaster General has already confirmed that mail-order medicine will continue to be delivered on Saturday.
The US Postal Service does not get any money from the federal government and has not since President Nixon made it quasi-private. In fact, they have had to pay back to the fed's billions of dollars for pensions. That's one of the reasons they keep losing money. They actually overpaid by a few hundred million and Congress refuses to return the money.
Trouble is, largely due to the govt unions...the actual downsizing in PEOPLE will likely not happen to the extent it should.
No.
The trouble is, we have a large contingency of elected people who have been intentionally trying to subvert the proper functioning of government for 30 years, and this is just one more way they are trying to do it. No company funds 75 years worth of retirement payments ahead, and for conservative fucktards in congress to pass legislation to force the post office to do so is nothing more than an intentional attempt to destroy USPS' ability to function.
At the same time, congress has refused to allow USPS to offer services that could generate more income because some of the truly fucking idiotic congress people are on this ideological bullshit meme of "privatization." Privatization always costs more money, because you add an additional layer of cost into the mix... called profit. Here's the rub: UPS and FedEx do not want to take over USPS' mail routes. It would be far too costly for them, and many times those services use USPS resources to move their packages anyway.
So the "trouble" is: really stupid fucking idiots who don't understand basic business, and hate that our government does ANYTHING for the people of this country.... and the stupid fucking idiots that empower those stupid fucking idiots.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Those who don't believe you should Google "The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006"*, and anybody who doesn't know about it has no business offering an opinion on the current woes of the Postal Service.
I will quibble that they actually aren't losing money. The 2006 act is taking it from them to fund pensions for employees not yet born.
*Which really should have been known as "The Republican Plot to Murder the Postal Service in Slow Motion" of 2006.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.