Posted on 01/24/2011 8:16:56 AM PST by Libloather
U.S. Postal Service to close 2,000 post offices
By Dow Jones Newswires-Wall Street Journal
Posted today at 7:13 a.m.
With red ink showing no sign of stopping, the U.S. Postal Service is hoping to ramp up a cost-cutting program that is already eliciting yelps of pain around the country. Beginning in March, the agency will start the process of closing as many as 2,000 post offices, on top of the 491 it said it would close starting at the end of last year.
In addition, it is reviewing another 16,000 — half of the nation’s existing post offices — that are operating at a deficit, and lobbying Congress to allow it to change the law so it can close the most unprofitable among them. The law currently allows the postal service to close post offices only for maintenance problems, lease expirations or other reasons that don’t include profitability.
The news is crushing in many remote communities where the post office is often the heart of the town and the closest link to the rest of the country. Shuttering them, critics say, also puts an enormous burden on people, particularly on the elderly, who find it difficult to travel out of town.
The postal service argues that its network of some 32,000 brick-and-mortar post offices, many built in the horse-and-buggy days, is outmoded in an era when people are more mobile, often pay bills online and text or email rather than put pen to paper. It also wants post offices to be profitable to help it overcome record $8.5 billion in losses in fiscal year 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagobreakingbusiness.com ...
All my bills are online.
If they cut the junk mail, I would only get Netflix.
That was Kevin Costner.
Yeah, I’m definitely off my game today...
Yes, the geniuses in our small town moved the post office from the middle of downtown to the edge of the city limits, the farthest location from any business in town. Now they have drop-off locations in some of the stores downtown.
I know a former mail carrier who left with full time 'disability' for a bad back. His wife had a brand new spanking baby about nine months later. So much for that 'bad back' disability.
My aren't we old-fashioned. She didn't have a bad back did she?
Yep, that’s true. I’ve never had any problems with my banks bill pay.
My mail carrier with the USPO said the employees are told all the time there is no money, but now the PO wants to put tracking devices and GSP in all their mail vehicles...
He estimated the government is now delivering about 20,000 tons of annoying junk mail every day.
This needs to be done, but I do empathize with Rural places, they are most likely to be unprofitable, and the post office is far more than simply a building to those communities.
I live in an urban area and there are at least 3 post offices that are within a mile or two of my house. The one that is most convient and likely to have elderly living near it in walking distance is likely the least profitable and smallest of them. It would likely close and the others that are newer built in newer neighborhoods with younger more mobile populations would survive.. leaving elderly, many of whom do not drive without easy access to get to a post office.. neither of the remaining 2 are even on a bus route.
For you or me, no big deal, generally do things online or hop in a car, but that 80 year old who never ever learned to drive and lives in the same house or on the same block she was born on, and doesn’t use computers, that’s going to make life more difficult for them.
Change isn’t a bad thing automatically, but the pace of change these days is truly scary when one steps back and bothers to think about it. Wasn’t all that long ago, humans would have gone hundreds of years without any major change in their lives.. now we change so fast we outmode our own existences before we expire.
If by old fashion you mean not getting disability when you know damn well he isn’t disabled, then yes, I’m old fashion.
That ‘bad back’ never stopped him from hunting & fishing when he pleased or riding his horses.
That will hurt businesses who rely on mail advertising.
Possibly but I doubt the stores get much revenue from the junk mail. I trash all I get and never look at it except for local grocery stores that I shop at. And they keep those flyers in the stores for shoppers anyway.
Mailboxes. You know, the big blue things that you used to see on every streetcorner? No staffing needed for those, other than pickup.
Now, Post Office Boxes are another story. Frankly, I don't think that they'd need full-time staffing, either. Just someone to come by and fill them up once a day.
“He estimated the government is now delivering about 20,000 tons of annoying junk mail every day. “
I would guess that there are private companies that would be glad to deliver the junk mail. But me thinks that the USPS would not give it up because it means jobs.
I was thinking of catalogue merchants. Big business.
Here's what I'd do:
1. Automate as much as possible. Pulling the stamp machines, scales and other stuff that allowed people to self serve hurt them.
2. Go to three days a week delivery. One route on one day, a different route on the next. That cuts the number of miles driven in half, and would at most delay delivery by one day. MWF for one route, TTS for the other. Flip the days the next week.
3. About fifteen years ago, the USPS started doing rural route delivery. You can keep the post office and a few employees, but go back to PO Boxes in small towns. I know of guys who drive a couple of hours to cover something like ten houses.
4. Increase the rates for bulk mail - big time.
There’s at least one PO in an extremely small town in the West, where a really nasty misanthropist rules as postmistress. ...mumbles a steady, infinite stream of negative speech to herself, because patrons in that locale avoid her.
When I bought my Christmas presents Target did not give out boxes to wrap them in. USPS gave me free boxes to wrap them in.
That’s nice of the post office to offer that service. However, you can get boxes free of charge ordering from the USPS online. The point of my comment to close the post offices is the fact that any service they offer can be handled from a website or the local grocery store or mini-mart. The cost of keeping a building open in every community to sell stamps, money orders and shipping is huge. I’m not against the post office. I’m for streamlining their business. After all, my tax dollars subsidize them.
I have lunch next to Three Mile Island Park with your kind in the summer, park bench. Wonderful people with those goofy hand held machines.
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