Our Views: A big change for the mail

The U.S. Postal Service’s plan to end Saturday mail delivery this August is one of many hard choices ahead for the postal service as it struggles to deal with the $15.9 billion loss it posted last year.

The postal service is an odd institution — an independent agency that functions in many respects as a business, although Congress has a say about some aspects of its operations. That’s a challenging management structure for an agency that touches virtually every American with its work.

Postal officials said that limiting mail delivery to Monday through Friday could save the agency $2 billion a year. The delivery of packages, a growing part of the agency’s business, will continue on Saturdays, and post office boxes will continue to receive mail on Saturday.

The postal service has seen a dramatic drop in mail delivery as Americans pay more bills online and use email rather than letters to communicate. We must wonder if ending Saturday delivery will further erode the appeal of postal mail, creating a spiral of decline for mail delivery.

Taken alone, ending Saturday mail delivery won’t put the postal service in the black. The agency needs more comprehensive change — perhaps on the order of the revolution in management that brought the modern postal service into being in 1971.

Comments

1) Comment by tradewinns - 09/02/2013

i'm not faulting the post office. the service they deliver for the price charged is unreal. they could and should raise their rates up to a dollar a letter and it would still be a bargin.

2) Comment by Bouncer - 08/02/2013

Given the ever-increasing capability of handling business electronically (online banking, online bill paying, etc.), the post office might very well become obsolete. Nobody "needs" mail. Deliveries of packages could be made semi-weekly, and that's it.

3) Comment by tradewinns - 08/02/2013

CBCS has the correct idea. the only thing you will normally receive in the mail is bills and advertising. ever once and awhile you will get a wedding invitation or the like but not that often. they could cut the mail service back to 2 or 3 times a week and the average person (exculde businesses) wouldn't miss much if anything.

4) Comment by CountryBoysCanSurvive - 08/02/2013

oops "their"

5) Comment by CountryBoysCanSurvive - 08/02/2013

Stop all mail..just think no more bills, your creditors would have to get off thier behinds and come to collect their money every month :)

6) Comment by Chucky - 08/02/2013

How can the Postal Service use E-Mail to make $ ? how about a good app that prints and send with all the perks of certified mail and return notification