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Posted on 11/17/2009 1:35:46 AM PST by ErnstStavroBlofeld
The Postal Service reported a loss of $3.8 billion last year, despite a reduction of 40,000 full-time positions and other cost-cutting measures.
The loss was $1 billion more than the year before despite job cuts and other efforts designed to save billions of dollars, postal officials said Monday.
"Our 2009 fiscal year proved to be one of the most challenging in the history of the Postal Service," Chief Financial Officer Joseph Corbett said.
"The deep economic recession, and to a lesser extent the ongoing migration of mail to electronic alternatives, significantly affected all mail products, creating a large imbalance between revenues and costs," he said.
The post office has been struggling to cope with a decline in mail volume caused by the shift to the Internet as well as the recession that resulted in a drop in advertising and other mail. Total mail volume was 177.1 billion pieces, compared to 202.7 billion pieces in 2008, a decline of almost 13 percent.
For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 the agency had income of $68.1 billion, $6.8 billion less than in 2008. Expenditures were down $5.9 billion to $71.8 billion.
Postmaster General John Potter is seeking permission from Congress to reduce mail delivery from six days a week to five, a move that could save the agency $3.5 billion annually.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Do we want the government running healthcare when they can’t even run the post office?
Exactly.
“Postmaster General John Potter is seeking permission from Congress to reduce mail delivery from six days a week to five, a move that could save the agency $3.5 billion annually.”
M-W-F would be ok with me.
That would be fine with me too.
Actually the US runs their post office better than just about every country in the world. They’re just effected by the economic and technological trends beyond their control. There are far better arguments against socialized medicine than our pretty efficient postal service.
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The post office brass could start out by closing on Tuesdays, and using that day for postmaster training and paperwork. The amount of new requirements heaped upon postmasters, most of which have NO impact on customer service, are mind-boggling.
Close all small rural post offices that have no rural delivery routes. More radical solutions would include starting to “grandfather” out rural routes upon retirement of carriers. Most rural customers come to town once a week or more. Let them pick their mail up at their PO box.
“Do we want the government running healthcare when they can’t even run the post office?”
They can run things alright, right in to the ground! (;^)
The Post Office is a legitimate expense of the Fed Gov. It is specifically mentioned in the Constitution. Tell me again how the Post Office can “lose” money? It’s an accounting thing. If the Post Office showed a profit, would we ever hear about it? Or would that money end up in the general fund?
Think about it. We don’t need the Post Office to cut back. We are being led around by the nose thinking it’s losing money. That is the same thing as saying the Military “lost” billions of dollars.
So we should just employ millions of unionized workers with full benefits, pensions, etc even if mail volume is shrinking at greater than 10% per year?
Sorry, but I am not supporting more non-working, liberal voters with my tax money.
I’m a Postmaster and a majority of employees are veterans and it runs about 50-50 dems/repubs. About 10% are militant union types who drag everyone else down
PENSIONS
When they started pushing “first class forever” stamps, the writing was on the wall that they were raising cash for promises of service further into the future (knowing that additional rate increases would push even more people into online bill payments, competing delivery services for packages, etc.).
No we shouldn’t simply pay people for not working. The post office IS cutting back.
All I’m saying is that we’re being duped. I work for the USPS and in our office we have a desperate need for more help that we’re not going to get.
But the USPS isn’t supposed to be a business, is my point. Ya, we can go on pretending that it is, and we can do things more efficiently to cut costs, etc. But the bottom line is the Fed Gov is supposed to support this service, just like it supports the military.
Is the military losing money? How much is their operational budget annually? How much are we “losing” every year?
I’d say our office is nearly 100% conservative. If not 100% it’s very close.
The military does not have an alternative that is eliminating its need like the post office.
Mail is slowly going away and eventually, the right thing to do is have the gov't subcontract the service to FedEx (which it is already trending towards).
There is no need for a large bureaucracy anymore to support a function fewer and fewer people use.
Yeah, and I hear the same thing from UAW workers, UMW workers, etc
The fact remains that 100% of you contribute to a leadership that supports liberals.
Some of us live in right-to-work states and have never joined the union.
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