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No more mail on Saturdays?
BY Kevin Hageland Staff Writer
The concept of the United State Postal Service dropping Saturday mail service has been bandied about for nearly a year now.
Some people dismissed that notion as unlikely, but thanks to Postmaster General John Potter, the idea has picked up steam once again over the past week.
At first, I kind of wondered if the motivation behind this idea was getting the entire weekend off. Hey, I totally understand that … a simple look around our office demonstrates that people avoid working weekends like they are avoiding the plague.
The cut off for Saturday would strictly be for home delivery. Several post offices would still be open, people could still drop off their mail and workers would still be there to sort through the mail.
Hhhmmm … I see. So, if it’s not a matter of wanting the weekend off, then what’s the problem?
Enter Potter once more. The Postmaster General said the USPS is likely to run a $7 billion deficit this year.
Apparently more Americans are going from paper to electronic communications … wow, really, is that breaking news? The number of items handled by the post office fell from 213 billion in 2006 to 177 billion last year. Volume is projected to shrink to 150 billion by 2020. The post office’s brilliant idea to curb this problem is to continue to raise the price of postage stamps at a rate higher than inflation.
Personally, I don’t have a beef with the fact that I have to pay 44 cents to send a letter almost anywhere I want, but plenty of people do have a problem with the rising price of stamps. Continuing to raise prices isn’t a very likely solution for getting people to send out more mail.
But let’s get back to the loss projection from the USPS.
Oh no, $7 billion whole dollars?!
Who cares?
Yes, I know, that seems like a lot of money, but consider the current economic climate. We have gotten in the business of bailing out people on unemployment, farmers, delinquent home owners and even banks, surely we can give the post office a bit more help.
If mail continues to trail off at the pace it has been, the USPS is anticipating a net loss of $238 billion over the next decade. Some more minor changes could probably lower that number, but even if it doesn’t, don’t we have more money than that remaining in our TARP funds?
And if the government doesn’t want to foot the bill for that, where are the lobbyists for Netflix in all this? And what about lobbyists for the junk mail and magazine industries? Surely this change wouldn’t do their businesses any favors.
This change is set to potentially go into effect as quickly as 2011 and I decided a blog was the best way to get the word out.
I was going to start a letter writing campaign, but I figured that wouldn’t really do a whole lot of good … I don’t know if you’ve heard, but people don’t really send letters anymore.
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