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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.
Wow, didn't think it would happen but it looks like they may have actually saved themselves a ton of money without too much inconvenience. This seems like a good thing.
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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
It never made sense that I could send a letter down the street or Nome Alaska for the same amount of money. Just seems like I shold be paying more. Otherwise why not just deregulate mail delivery? UPS, DHL and/or Fedex may be able to do it more efficiently.
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.
Personally I don't really care if the USPS discontinues Saturday delivery, but FTFA the agency was down $16 billion last year and this will only save them $2 billion. $14 billion is a lot to make up each year. I would like to know what they plan to do about that.
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.
Article says they're dropping first-class Saturday delivery, no mention of priority or express. If you need something delivered ASAP, you probably aren't sending it first-class.
imagine that, a corporate whoring teabagger repeating the same old lies in an attempt at blaming the victims, yet again.
Robotic mail and package delivery is possible, now that driverless vehicles are being legalized. I can find no downside.
Robots have no interest in reading your mail.
Robots have no need for the contents of your package.
Robots have no need of unions or pensions.
Robots would never be tempted to dump mail in their attic in order to take the day off.
Robots could easily be programmed with alternative delivery instructions in the event that you need your item dropped elsewhere when you're on vacation.
All postal willing postal workers could be retrained as robotic technicians. The transition could be a public works project of the future.
So, I get this note in the mailbox that I have a package that is too big for the mailbox, I have to pick it up at the PO. But, I leave for work before the PO opens, return after it closes, and it's 50 miles away so I can't sneak down there during lunch. Result: If the PO is closed on Saturday too, I have a real problem, having to take off work for yet another thing, getting a package from the PO. If it is open on Saturday, then there will most assuredly be a 2 hour line, out the door and into the snow, because everyone else is going to be doing the same thing.
Here in Canada, we only receive mail on weekdays. It works just fine because the majority of letters in our mailbox are not extremely time-sensitive - the occasional municipal bill, magazines, and periodic greeting cards from around the world. They could reduce letter delivery to M/W/F without really causing any issues. Daily parcel delivery makes sense because they're larger dollar transactions and whenever a parcel is on the way, someone is waiting for it. I cringe every time someone suggests getting rid of the post office and relying on FedEx and UPS instead, because they tend to be far more expensive in Canada. As an example, UPS will charge a brokerage fee for surface packages coming from the USA that easily hits $25. Sending a 2 lb package to the USA by UPS Express (even 3-day) costs about $60. Canada Post runs about 25% of that.
Back to the USA, there are already some interesting private/public delivery programs that promise to keep service costs low, too. As an example, Smartpost is an economical FedEx service that uses the USPS to deliver the last mile. Expect more of this stuff in the future.
The potential of mail in your box doesn't affect the "feel" of your weekend. If you get all OCD about it that's your decision.
Yeah. First class mail is really third or fourth class mail.
I bought a plant on ebay. The seller shipped it to me as "media mail" to save money, something that's supposed to be used only for textbooks. I guess it could become a textbook one day so that's alright?
Later, also on ebay, I tried to sell a used game. When I typed in the upc, it told me the shipping information used by other sellers of that item, on average. The average listed weight was 6 oz. The actual weight when I measured it on my scale read 9 oz, not even close. It made a dollar difference in shipping.
Little things like this add up.
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.
They offer free tracking if you buy your postage online. Heck, they actually pay you for the tracking since postage rates online are cheaper than if you walk into a post office.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Will Netflix lower the cost of DVD/Blu-ray rentals since I can't view as many movies per month now?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
This is the only logical way for a Canadian consumer to buy American. Any other way only leads to extortion in "brokerage fees".
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
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
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?
All political BS aside, without saturday delivery wont a lot of people just go over to FedEX or UPS?
I don't know about where you live but UPS doesn't deliver on Saturdays over here. I think FedEx will if you pay extra.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
More than an hour? Talk about white people problems.
Cut a mail slot in your door and install a flap. Then all your mail will be in your home, just like the rest of your stuff.
Couldn't they charge extra for weekend delivery to make it economical?
Since the postage is paid by the sender, how will the sender know that what he sends will be delivered on the weekend and thus require more money? And what is to stop the post office from simply holding on to all mail until Saturday so they can charge more for delivering it? Cut back on postal workers during the week, rake in the money on Saturday.
If you mean "pay more in advance for weekend delivery", then you'll simply create the same issue that exists in the overnight and two-day delivery system. That is, I've lost count of the number of times that I've paid extra to a company so they'll ship the thing I really need tomorrow by overnight express, and then find out that they weren't going to bother shipping it for a week anyway. In the USPS case, they'll happily accept money for weekend delivery, but claim that the parcel didn't get to the destination postal center until Monday so they couldn't have delivered it on the weekend anyway.
Corporate America used to offer pensions to their employees but as greedy, how-can-we-cash-out-today management thinking took over they stopped funding their pensions adequately, basically doing what USPS was doing, "borrowing" from the future.
As management drains more and more from the company, they eventually file bankruptcy which gives them the green light to unload their pensions "under financial duress" to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, who then takes on the pension obligations.
It sounds like a good idea, except that PBGC gets to meat-axe pension benefits and people who were expecting to live on pensions find that the benefits they were promised as workers are no longer enough to live on.
While the whole story is sordid -- many workers accepted lower wages in exchange for generous pension benefits, and corporations who underfund their benefits for short-term profits get to hand the mess over to someone else, scot-free -- why can't the USPS play by those same rules?
IMHO the USPS can't ever be a success; they have all the handicaps of a government entity, plus burdens that corporate America gets to escape from.
Congress should consider allowing private companies to step in and do it for them.
Well, the private shippers might consider it, if they weren't already contracting with the USPS to do their deliveries in rural areas, you uninformed retardate.
That is all.
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?
Actually, it's a Constitutionally-granted monopoly.
But you knew that. And you know it's not on 'letters', it's on post boxes. The same ones that fall under the universal service obligation.
But, those would be adult arguments, and your tone suggests you want to have a different type of discussion.
They called Congress's bluff and stopped making excess payments - no cash.
Similar with Saturday mail. They got tired of waiting for Congress to approve their two year old restructuring plan, so they are acting unilaterally.
In Canada, we've always had 5-day a week mail delivery service. What doesn't get delivered on a Saturday will be distributed on a Monday instead. Yes, individual postal workers won't get to work as many hours during the week, but you'll all still get your mail. IMHO, Americans will get used to this, and it won't harm the quality of service of mail delivery in any real measurable way.
Shortages are the price of a good mail system?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Ask UPS and FedEx how well that model works for them.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
If so, then your actual position is that it is literally impossible for SS or the PO to be fiscally responsible without destroying the currency?
So the surplus is actually a deficit, up is down, black is white, back to front and you're all up tight?
At this point, it might be necessary to raise the retirement age, but it may also be necessary to make sure older workers don't get the heave ho at 65.
Remember, 'they' include your mom and dad and 'they' had about as much control over the government as you do. One day you will be one of 'they'.