USPS to end Saturday mail
 

RIP....



http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013...to-trim-costs/




The U.S. Postal Service plans to announce Wednesday that it will end Saturday mail delivery, in one of the most significant steps taken to date to cut costs at the struggling agency.

A source familiar with the decision confirmed the plan to Fox News.

Under the proposal, the Postal Service will continue to deliver packages six days a week. The plan, which is aimed at saving about $2 billion, would start to take effect in August.

The move accentuates one of the agency's strong points -- package delivery has increased by 14 percent since 2010, officials say, while the delivery of letters and other mail has declined with the increasing use of email and other Internet use.

Under the new plan, mail would still be delivered to post office boxes on Saturdays. Post offices now open on Saturdays would remain open on Saturdays.

Over the past several years, the Postal Service has advocated shifting to a five-day delivery schedule for mail and packages -- and it repeatedly but unsuccessfully appealed to Congress to approve the move. Though an independent agency, the service gets no tax dollars for its day-to-day operations but is subject to congressional control.

It was not immediately clear how the service could eliminate Saturday mail without congressional approval.

But the agency clearly thinks it has a majority of the American public on its side regarding the change.

Material prepared for the Wednesday press conference by Patrick R. Donahoe, postmaster general and CEO, says Postal Service market research and other research has indicated that nearly 7 in 10 Americans support the switch to five-day delivery as a way for the Postal Service to reduce costs

ya, so if they were to stop delivery service altogether, that should solve more problems.

Why did they start delivering on Saturday in the first place?

just ditch the system and privatize?

no idea if that would be good or bad.

FEDEX and UPS seem to be doing ok.

sounds like a smart move....threre ins't anything that comes in Saturday's mail that can't wait until Monday...for me at least

Congress's inability to approve this years ago is a significant indication of their pathetic inability to get anythign done, even when it's beyond obvious what needs to be done.

it's nudie magazine day!!! /billy madison

I always forget to check the mail on Saturdays anyway, so this works well for me.

Both use the USPS for their unprofitable rural deliveries.

The USPS was designed to subsidize the rural routes with money from urban delivery. Whether you approve of that or not, if you privatize the USPS, people in rural areas are going to get hosed.

What's killing the USPS right now is online bill payment, and that's only going to get worse.

what's killing the USPS is their inability to change their business model and re-design their organziation accordingly.

Do you want to expand on that?

Their business model is a mandate to deliver anywhere in the country for the same price - with the idea that this intrinsically strengthens our country by bringing it closer together. Maybe that's an antiquated notion now in the era of email, but at the time that was the idea. In return no private industry is allowed to compete with them in their core business by law. If they were it would be way too easy for private industry to pick off the plum profitable routes, while the USPS would still have to deliver the crappy rural routes.

The USPS was designed to subsidize rural delivery on the backs of urban delivery. If you want to change that, you have to change their mandate, not their business model.

No, I agree....the mandate has to change then a business model will have to be changed/developed. The USPS will continue to play a diminishing role so the best bet is for the government to change mandate/monopoly...and let the business go private.

It's about time. I've been saying drop sat delivery for a long time now.

yep...the idea is old, antiquated, outdated. Change or die.