Not just in Birmingham. Pretty much everywhere including here in South Florida. One of the DUmbest moves ever.
Ordinarily a full array of stamp vending equipment requires some serious maintenance costs.
Since postal employee costs (whether at work stations controlling sorting equipment, or on carrier routes, or doing maintenance) occur in quanta of 8 hours duration, a minor savings of 2 or 3 hours may well not be recoverable.
With a typical finance station operation, 2 clerks will cost 16 hours per day. If you put in stamp machines that save 2 hours, but generate maybe 4 hours of maintenance time per week, your net savings are -2 hours. That is, the machines cost you more than they were worth. A larger station might generate a savings of 8 hours per day, so the machines might appear to be worth it, but you still have to have maintenance, and that might be 8 hours of maintenance time per week.
For many years the justification for vending machines was simple customer convenience and as long as the maintenance personnel could be paid for, that was OK.
Now the organization is short of money so every possible savings must be taken. Removing the vending machines from everywhere but a few dozen very large finance stations around the nation is probably the correct route to take.
No, it's not because this saves anybody's job, but rather it's because it's time to cut back on frills like those machine maintenance hours!