Calling the six-days-per-week mail delivery business model “no longer sustainable,” the U.S. Postal Service announced Wednesday it will eliminate Saturday delivery of mail by Aug. 1.
The plan to change delivery from six days a week to five would only affect first-class mail. Packages, mail-order medicines, priority and express mail would still be delivered on Saturdays, and local post offices will remain open for business Saturdays.
According to the U.S. Postal Service, the reasons are continued economic struggles and the increasing use of the Internet for communications and bill paying by consumers. The U.S. Postal Service is also the only federal agency required to pre-fund health benefits for retirees, and those costs are escalating quickly.
“Our current business model of delivering mail six days a week is no longer sustainable. We must change in order to remain an integral part of the American community for decades to come.”
Saturday is the lightest mail delivery day by volume and many businesses are closed on Saturdays, according to the U.S. Postal Service. However, many residents receive print magazines and ads on Saturdays in the mail that may be shifted to another day.
A Rasmussen poll on mail delivery in 2012 showed “Three-out-of-four Americans (75%) would prefer the U.S. Postal Service cut mail delivery to five days a week rather than receive government subsidies to cover ongoing losses.”
A USA Today/Gallup poll in 2010 found the majority of U.S. residents surveyed were ok with eliminating Saturday delivery. The March 2010 telephone survey of 999 adults revealed people age 55 and older were more likely than younger people to have used the mail to pay a bill or send a letter in the past two weeks.
Speak out: How will this change affect you? Will you miss getting mail on Saturdays?
Based on the media and the article above "Packages, mail-order medicines, priority and express mail would still be delivered on Saturdays, and local post offices will remain open for business Saturdays."
As a union lawyer I admire how you are so succinctly able to boil down such a complex problem, and give so much credit to labor unions for destroying the postal service’s Saturday delivery. However, you may want to factor in electronic email and/or the internet as the chief cause of the post office’s economic woes, rather than taking the knee-jerk reaction of blaming the lawful representative of the workers. If you’ve had a chance to read the papers lately (like within the past 30 years), you’d see that the labor laws in this country are not exactly employee-friendly. With this said, I think that you give my legal brethren far too much credit for out-smarting management. Do you think that the postal service lawyers/negotiators are so inept as to let the workers run roughshod over all labor negotiations? Let’s put on our thinking cap or take a deep breath before we misappropriate blame. Cheers!
My real sorrow is that my mailman is retiring! He has been my friend by delivering small packages to the door and a moment of conversation. If you want fewer junk ads in your box - grin, don't subscribe to things you will not use, or clothing you will not be wearing!