Facing another year of losses in the billions of dollars, the U. S. Postal Service announced on Wednesday, Feb. 6, that it will be ending Saturday mail delivery.
The change won’t go in to effect until August, and the Postal Service won’t completely shut down on Saturdays. Package delivery will continue, and the offices will stay open. Stopping Saturday mail delivery is expected to save the Postal Service $2 billion a year.
This event doesn't actually come completely out of the blue, as the Postal Service has been trying to make this cut for years, but Congress has always opposed it in the past. People have already voiced their disappointment and complaints and Hallmark is doing all they can to prevent the change.
The argument can be looked at two ways. While it initially looks like a bad thing, it might actually be a good thing.
Bad thing — The end of Saturday delivery cuts back on a major service that the Postal Service offers.
This cut is really a small change, and it seems like it might not be enough to get the Postal Service out of the red and into the black.
This cut could, however, be just the start of other changes.
Perhaps rural deliveries will be cut down to a weekly event rather than a daily service. Mail deliveries could be made to neighborhood drop boxes and not individual homes. After those changes, how long before mail delivery is reduced to three days a week?
If those options don't work, the next option seems to be privatization of the Postal Service.
If owned by a private company, the Postal Service would have to be profitable, but with losses in the billions, massive price increases would be required to accomplish this task.
Good thing — The state of government financial problems shows up in the news constantly. Continually raising the debt ceiling, bankrupt states unable to pay their bills and ever increasing trade deficits are just the short list of issues effecting the government. By stopping Saturday delivery, the Postal Service shows a great deal of fiscal responsibility. Other government agencies and perhaps a portion of the U.S. population could learn something from the post office’s actions.
The Postal Service lost $15.9 billion in 2012. To put it in perspective, that’s a larger loss than the economic production of Jamaica, Iceland or Mongolia for that same period of time.
The United States won’t be the only country without Saturday delivery. Large nations such as Canada, Sweden and Australia all deliver mail five days a week. Canada offered it for a time, but discontinued the service in 1969.
Making small cuts like moving to five days a week for delivery is a better option than ignoring the problem. Losing a day is a smaller and more gradual change compared to moving directly to delivering only three days a week.
Overall, while there has been and will be a lot of public outcry about this occurrence, it actually looks like the lesser of two evils. It’s better to accept this small cut now than to lose the Postal Service to privatization. With the increasing popularity of email and online bill payment, there is less of a role for the Postal Service outside of delivering packages.
This reduction to the delivery schedule really looks to be a more positive situation than a negative one. To those who are claiming that the Postal Service has lost a customer over this change, the best of luck with you and learning the ancient art of smoke signals
http://www.westerncourier.com/opinions/big-changes-to-the-postal-service-no-not-the-band/article_72b16b9c-7241-11e2-a216-0019bb30f31a.html
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