Saturday Delivery

Here in Houston the big post office in downtown is open
till noon on Saturday, good luck waiting inline for 2 hours.
Neighborhood stations been closed on Saturday for ages.

I think Saturday delivery is excessive in times of restraint. But I like the fact that in Canada we have post offices open 7 days a week.

In Canada the 'Post Offices' usually open on Saturdays and Sundays are the ones located in drug stores (associate post offices) that are staffed by drug store employees who are paid by drug stores. At least here in Halifax.

Most of the Post Offices in Halifax area are these associate types.

These full service Post Offices are open now during the hours of operation of the drug store they are located in, so 9 AM - 9 PM, which is great. They usually have a rather full range of philatelic product too.

If all you need are booklets of self adhesive stamps for mailing a normal letter you can buy them at the front cash (drug store) or even at grocery stores. But no singles or blocks or such stuff. Strictly something that can be scanned.

The delivery of and pick up of mail and parcels by regular Canada Post employees does not happen on the weekends.

So, you can take your parcel to the associate post office on a Saturday/Sunday but it won't move anywhere until Monday usually. But you feel like you have started the process and 'got it into the mail' when you drop your precious parcel off.

We complain about the costs of mailing here (57 cents to mail a letter within Canada) plus up to 13% tax in some parts of Canada, and the only parcel service of a reasonable (?) rate is the Expedited tracked parcel which cost $10 minimum (no small packet rate within Canada).

But hey, Canada Post has made a profit over the last years. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy all over! And no I don't work for them! Darn it.

From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Post
(Link: scroll down for a brief scoop on privatization in many other country's Post Offices.)

'In terms of area serviced, Canada Post delivers to a larger area than the postal service of any other nation, including Russia (where service in Siberia is limited largely to communities along the railway).'

Hard to believe I know.

I wish we had some of the more cost effective means of shipping that you guys enjoy, albeit with long lines etc etc, and I envy you your Saturday delivery. Enjoy it while you have it! Oh, and the cheaper prices too!

Here, wherever that is, all but one of the suburban post offices close window service for lunch, but a few years ago the main post office extended its hours from 5 PM to 6 PM weekdays and from noon to 2 PM on Saturdays.

I remember my father telling me more than once that mail was at one time delivered twice daily in the city. I'm guessing he was referring to the 1930's.

As for Saturday delivery, it makes no difference to me though it's one less day on which bills can arrive!

puzzler you can add more totheor profit dont forget to buy me the whole definitive set you will get the warma nd fuzzy feeling all over again :)

I hope that the postal service survives. It would be a shame to scrap a system that has operated since before the US existed. I always thought it was a mistake to change the old USPOD to the USPS. I think there are some institutions which should not be privatized, although the privatization was not quite complete in the case of postal service.

Ahem (clears throat), get over it guys (tongue-in-cheek of course). We haven't had Saturday deliveries in decades in Australia.

Post Offices are open from 9-5, or, when you;re at work! Licensed PO's, which are franchised, may open on Saturday mornings, but most of them refuse to stock ANY stamps other than minimum value peel-and-stick rubbish, because they actually have to pay for the stamps and hold them as stock. So, they don't!

I heard a trivia question on the radio this week.

Q. "Five out of six people under 18 years old have never touched what?"

A. "A postage stamp"

Let's just say that the Post Office isn't helping.

but dear jubliee stamps have existed for only 17 decades much less in australia :)

I really don't see how any organization can possibly turn a profit when they are being told how much they are allowed to charge for a service, how much service has to be provided, how much they have to hold in reserve for retirement accounts, and what days they have to be open for business... That's the challenge USPS faces. It's like being thrown into a boxing ring with Mike Tyson and having one arm tied behind your back and a hood thrown over your head and then told to win no matter what. Simply ain't gonna happen!

-Allen

The problem is that it is not a business. Now, I will give no ground to anyone on my admiration of Hayek et al but...the USP(O)S) is a service, not a business.

We mandate that the PO delivers to each mail box everywhere in the country. from shore to shore and valley to mountain top. And each piece of mail to each recipient is priced the same, whether that mail box receives one piece a day and is in Nome or 50 pieces a day and is in DC. As a matter of public policy, this has been mandated since the first adhesives and on that basis to pretend that it is a business is just ridiculous. If you want to run it like a business then stop the public policy mandates, but for so long as it has those mandates, we need to stop pretending.

Yes, it really is just an agency of the government mandated to serve everyone. The fear has always been that competition would pick up the big, easy delivery areas like DC, and leave the USPS places like Nome, Alaska.

And it will continue in this direction, I'm certain. At least it will in the major industrialized nations.

I can remember vacuum tubes being available in every supermarket in the early 1970s, along with a big testing board that allowed you to plug in every type of common tube to find out if it still worked or not. TVs and radios containing vacuum tubes were still common, so the need for replacement tubes was there because the things burnt out all the time. Nowadays, there's almost no need for them because everybody has modern TVs and stereos, so there's no sense in putting a tester in a supermarket to handle the 0.01 percent of the population that owns a high-end vacuum tube amplifier for their stereo system.

Once upon a time, everybody wore hats when they were out in public, so there used to be haberdashers all over the place, but there's no need for that now. Refrigerators have removed the need for the ice man to come door to door selling ice. The same thing will happen with the need for a post office that provides basic mail service.

Need to pay your power bill? Online banking. Want to send a birthday card to your cousin? E-cards. Want to send a love letter to your girlfriend? Text her on your cell phone or send her an e-mail. 50 years from now, where will there be a need for a post office that sends letters? Package delivery will still continue to exist because there's no way to transport physical material, and that will be the only future for the post office. (That, and the occasional need for somebody in one of the advanced nations to send a letter to TheMiddleOfNowhere-istan.)

I have no doubt that stamps will still exist, but they will be produced for collectors, just like vinyl records are still produced for the collectors who want them, or player piano rolls, or steam engines or vacuum tubes or whatever example you choose of something once common but now outdated by "advancements" in technology. A mail collection box will be as hard to find as a pay phone, and will eventually disappear from the cityscape because eventually there will no longer be a need for them.

Ryan

In Western Australia (I'm not sure about other States)we get postal deliveries only Mon to Fri. Our post offices are open Mon to Fri and Saturday morning, and you can still get stamps and coins from them. I guess they keep them afloat by letting them sell all sorts of stuff and becoming a bill paying service.

Steve

A big part of a Post Office's (of most nations) business and/or income is from business.

And business loves direct mail advertising because it actually works better than a lot of other forms of advertising in terms to actual response to the ad sent and seen.

The decline of letter boxes on every street corner continues (in Canada anyway) to where they are now only located in places where letters are mailed a lot, and that is close to small businesses.

I know it is great to mail a birthday card to someone or other matter of a personal nature but as stated above that business has slowed to a dribble because of electronic sendings.

The real business is business. Sending and receiving. The postal service also has to be cost effective for businesses to want to consider using it.

The need for autonomy by a Post Office (the ability to be able to act on one's own in regard to pricing) is an important factor that almost needs to be wedded to the legislation referencing the right of every citizen to expect mail delivery and basic mail service.

And of course I still want my birthday cards to come in the mail. Seems like it means more when you send it that way. To me anyway.

Sure, bills can be paid online but say, in the future, you are forced into a matrix in which you must agree to automatic debits from your electronic funds to pay for utilities and other services, as long as you, as a consumer, have a right to see what it is that is being charged to you, which may not be very much longer in our growing bankster slave state, mail delivery will be necessary since not everyone is or wants to be online and use email.