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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."
If only there were some article of the Constitution that could be used as an argument to convince conservatives that the Post Office is a vital national service and that it is okay to pay for it in much the same way as it is okay to pay for a navy.
I guess one can only wish.
most of my mail is paper catalogs i throw in the trash without looking at. bills get paid by computer or smartphone.
i guess the old people will be complaining
It doesn't help that Congress is basically stealing $5 billion a year from the post office. They're making the USPS fully fund retirement plans over a very short time, and that money is going into government bonds, which ends up in the general fund. If it wasn't for the budget shenanigans that Congress pulled, the Post Office would be doing fine.
Now if only Amazon would start letting us choose USPS over UPS for package delivery. As an apartment dweller, this would make my life much easier.
throw the baby out. The bathwater is cold
We could eliminate the DOJ's yearly anti-terrorism funding and not only save Saturday delivery, but put the USPS back in good shape fiscally.
Somehow I don't think expanding the TSA, buying millions of rounds of hollow-point ammo and giving them automatic assault rifles to fight boogeymen is helping anything.
imagine that, a corporate whoring teabagger repeating the same old lies in an attempt at blaming the victims, yet again.
Submit your billing on Tuesday.
The post office was forced into this because their unfunded pension fund was a time bomb waiting to happen. They are only paying this increase till 2016 and have had it reduced when it was pressing. As of 2009 it was estimated their unfunded liabilities were over fifty billion dollars.
No, where Congress gets a failing grade is similar to how base closings are done. Just like the military knows which bases are not needed the Post Office can tell you which sorting centers, distribution hubs, and which Post Offices, are not needed. When they go to close them then suddenly every Congressman becomes an expert and you end up with stories about how the PO wanted to close nearly 3000 offices and only got a little over a hundred.
The PO operates under burdensome contracts combined with quickly shrinking sources of income. The number of pieces of mail handled has steadily declined but when the PO tries to downsize Congress interferes or their contracts block them. Trying to hire part time workers is another area they have difficulty with.
So, no their problems don't stem from just having to pay for liabilities they should be paying for; if anything ask Congress why that rule ain't applied to the US as a whole; its from a myriad of items of which two largest are Congress and the unions.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
No more getting two Netflix shipments a week by sending the movie back the day after you receive it.
There's really not much they can do about it. The main reason the USPS is down $16 billion is because Congress is intentionally trying to bankrupt them.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Cost to send a letter via UPS: $30
Cost to send a letter via USPS: $0.46
One of them's certainly more efficient, but it isn't UPS.
Imagine that: unions, affirmative action and compliance with well-intentioned government programs do make you anti-competitive after all.
The USPS is the most efficient system for moving things from one place to the other on the planet. Seriously. Its private competitors cost far more to move the same amount of stuff in a similar amount of time, and its international counterparts don't come close to dealing with the kinds of requirements the USPS has to deal with. Their systems and procedures are designed so that practically anybody can get hired, follow the manual, and do the job correctly, and are also capable of working under a wide variety of conditions ranging from tiny towns in the middle of Alaska to lower Manhattan.
It's not that they aren't competitive. It's that the demand for their entire industry has dropped, and their bosses are actively trying to screw them up.
I am officially gone from
Wow! If they're that good, then it makes me wonder why they have to have a government-granted monopoly on letters.
The monopoly position is one of the reasons it works. If you were to cherry pick the easy to deliver stuff by starting a service without universal coverage, you might be able to do it cheaper, but if you want universal delivery, not so much.
Are there any G20 countries without a monopoly postal system?
You can send a lot of stuff electronically if you have electronics. And an Internet connection.
The Post Office is not "in business" any more than the US Navy is "in business". It's a Constitutionally authorized function of the Government.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Actually, the people who have tried anyway had a rate half that of the USPS. Of course the government shut them down, because monopolies are efficient and virtuous.
Actually in that article the "American Letter Mail Company" did exactly what UPS, FedEx or any other private company would do if allowed to compete - pick large cities and only serve that market. USPS has the mandate of serving any address in the country for the same cost, regardless of whether it is the middle of Alaska or downtown Manhattan.
It is easy to undercut USPS if you only serve New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.