Saturday Delivery

Here's an article from the Washington Times:

The postman won't even ring once on weekends. In a desperate attempt to trim costs, the U.S. Postal Service is cutting off your Saturday service. This move is too little, too late for one of the federal government's most bloated and incompetent bureaucracies.

Yesterday, the Postal Service formally asked federal regulators for permission to move to a five-day delivery schedule. This reduction in service, the bureaucrats claim, will save $2 billion to $3 billion a year. While that big number might sound impressive, this supposedly "self-supporting" government agency has a long way to go.

The post office is projected to bleed $7 billion in red ink this year on top of an existing debt of $13.2 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office. By 2020, the postal system will lose $35 billion every year, and the accumulated debt will reach a staggering $230 billion - all of which will be saddled on taxpayers. In short, the modern successor to the pony express is stampeding toward insolvency.

Like the rest of the federal government, the post office's fiscal troubles can be directly traced to its unionized bureaucracy. More than 80 percent of the postal budget is devoted to the agency's 581,070 career employees. Because a mandatory collective bargaining process determines wages, hours worked and workplace conditions, postal employees enjoy benefits even more exorbitant than what other federal employees receive.

The cushy life of a postal worker sounds nice, unless you're one of the 155 million taxpaying Americans who is picking up the tab but can't manage to get a simple letter delivered on time. At the end of last year, postal benefits packages contained $51.9 billion in unfunded retirement obligations. Combine that with the cost of running 36,500 post offices - that's more locations than McDonald's, Starbucks and Walgreens combined - and you have a program where expenses have run out of control at a time when mail delivery has never been less relevant.

It made sense to establish a government postal monopoly in 1782. Back then, no other reliable means of long-distance communication existed. Now, electronic bill-paying options, telephone, e-mail and fax machines have cut the need for envelopes and stamps by 20 percent in just the past few years.

What better time could there be to repeal the statute making it a crime for companies like FedEx and UPS to deliver first-class mail. Taxpayers should insist on cutting off the lumbering postal union bureaucracy and see how well it can truly survive on its own. Opening up America's mailboxes to the free market would ensure better service while saving nearly a quarter-trillion dollars.

Just think about all the juicy possibilities for new local and private stamps if this were to happen - it won't of course.

Swabbie:

I don't know what you think, but I think the author of this piece has an obvious bias against the post office; there must be a more balanced opinion.

I don't know the answer, but I'm not sure rushing to privatize USPS is the solution. And personally, I'd hate to see my post office closed and replaced by a kiosk in Wal-Mart. Potter must be feeling pressure; at first he said he was opposed to eliminating Saturday delivery, now it seems a foregone conclusion.

Is it possible that some of the response to this crisis is an excuse to eliminate USPS personnel, reduce salaries, and bust the postal workers union?

Anyway, it seems USPS is doomed in the long run.

i hope they stop taking out new stamps I cant afford it as it is. :(

I can't see how any private enterprise would take over regular letter delivery of the sort provided by the USPS post office. FedEx and UPS are perfectly happy cherry-picking the profitable stuff. Unless they get to charge $14.95 to deliver a birthday card from grandma in Swampgas, Louisiana to her grandson in Buffalo Butt, Montana, they aren't touching that business. (If they decide they want to try, I'm buying puts in their stock that day.)

My .02.

(Nothing against LA or MT...both are nice places to visit.)

hahaha Cj posts are getting better by the second

That's three miles down the road - I live uptown only 10 miles from the post office!

IMHO he's pretty much on target except that I don't think anyone will be able to make money on snail mail - government or private. BTW, Amtrak sits at the same table as the USPS.

The union has killed profitability at the USPS (and elsewhere)as much as the decrease in volume.

I wonder what the true cost of a future stamp will be if we factor in the amount of our taxes which will be siphoned off to support the institution?

That's exactly what's happened in the UK ! Most Main post offices are now well glued to the basement of the newsagent WH Smiths !
There are no philatelic goodies, no stamps at all in most cases and queues as long as Southend Pier ! I hate them with a passion. Glad I don't have to see them for most of the year.

In Israel, most Post Offices are open 5 days a week.....so stop complaining !

[Just joking]

Londonbus1....Loves complaining.

Does this mean that they USPS will close everything on Saturdays? or maybe just home delivery of the mail....For instance, the PO will be open at the clerks window, but the carriers will not be out making their rounds. Just a thought.

I agree...the government will have to suck it up and increase subsidies to the USPS because, for the time being at least, the myth of universal delivery needs to be perpetuated.

If broadband is given the same treatment as the push for rural electrification in the early part of the last century, then maybe there will come a day when the postal service can be scaled back significantly at little political cost to anyone. That day isn't here, yet.

I honestly didn't know there were POs with counters open on Saturdays anywhere anymore. The doors are open for PO box patrons here, and they still sort to the boxes, but that's it.

My tiny little post office has relatively short counter hours during the week, but is open for counter service for about an hour on Saturday mornings, which comes in handy if you can't make it there M-F.

Sorry, I don't trust a newspaper owned by Rev. Moon and his moonie goons. It's DC's New York Post. There's A LOT more to this issue than "unions". Rising energy costs, Internet competition and decreases use of the mail, retirement pensions, rising health care costs and more.

Yes, the post office has problems, but the UPS and FedEx is no fun either. From my own experience the latter two are much more expensive. A 3 pound box to the UK via USPS mid-$20, but over $90 via UPS. UPS likes to break things (a computer scanner that sounded like a bag of broken glass) and after seeing their inside operations of how things are handled, it's pretty bad. FedEx here near Albany hires ex-cons and when I tried to get a special ring for my wife sent to me it was stolen at the FedEx facility. I had the jeweler mail the replacement ring via USPS and it arrived fine and on time. I say NO to FedExCon and OOPS to deliver any 1st class mail. I don't even want packages sent by them.

The post offices will still be open on Saturday (if that's their current schedule) and Express mail service will still be in operation . Will

All the PO's in my area have the window counter open on Saturdays at least for a few hours. The Main PO window is even open later in the afternoon. I think the PO Boxes have to be accessible most hours of the day if not 24 hours.

Hahahahahahhahaha...from Wikipedia:

The Washington Times has lost money every year that it has been in business. By 2002, the Unification Church had spent about $1.7 billion subsidizing its operation of the Times.[10] In 2003, The New Yorker reported that a billion dollars had been spent since the paper's inception, as Moon himself had noted in a 1991 speech, "Literally nine hundred million to one billion dollars has been spent to activate and run the Washington Times"[11]. In 2002, Columbia Journalism Review suggested Moon had spent nearly $2 billion on the Times.[12] In 2008, Thomas F. Roeser of the Chicago Daily Observer mentioned competition from the Times as a factor moving the Washington Post to the right, and said that Moon had "announced he will spend as many future billions as is needed to keep the paper competitive."

...Hello Kettle! Maybe it's the Times that needs to go. Will

I live in San Jose and at least the PO by me is open (I think to 2PM) on Saturdays and I think the Philatelic window is actually open some of that time.

As far as the cost, the author had it nailed. the union entitlements for the retirees is killing this system (as well as our auto industry, our city governments, etc) When you need to pay hundreds of thousands of people 60% of their pay check for 30 years after they stop working...that adds up. Imagine how expensive it will get to collect a mint examples every $3.65 first class stamp produced :)