Saturday Mail

[Wayne Goodwin]

Post office retreats on eliminating Saturday mail

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/04/10/3973412/postal-service-...

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/04/10/3973412/postal-service-...http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/04/10/3973412/postal-service-...

[Wayne Goodwin]

Doesn't matter to me if they cut down to 3 days a week . I sometimes check my box maybe 1 time a week . I don't get any bills by mail . I pay all mine on line ...

But they need to do something to cut cost . Seems they can't even break even . Why all those stamps they print . All they need is a one stamp for all . And charge what the stamp is gonna be used for . They give ya all the boxes ya want free . That's a waste of money there .

[ProblemAgain]

we've been over this before....congress contrived the mess by forcing the pension funding at a rate no one else has to pay...and the loss of mail income by things like netflix which was the post office's single largest customer going to digital downloads

Can the Postal Service be saved?

By The Week's Editorial Staff | The Week – Sat, Mar 9, 2013

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The USPS is losing $25 million... a day

What's wrong with the post office?
It's hemorrhaging money at the rate of about $25 million a day. The U.S. Postal Service, the nation's second-biggest employer after Walmart, lost almost $16 billion in the last fiscal year. By next fall, it is projected to have less than three days' worth of operating expenses on hand. (As an independent agency operating with federal oversight, the USPS can borrow money from the government to cover its losses but doesn't get any direct funding.) To ward off reckoning day, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe last month announced that Saturday delivery of regular mail would end in August, in order to save $2 billion a year. That plan is meeting stiff resistance in Congress, which has notified Donahoe that he lacks "the constitutional and statutory authority" to eliminate Saturday delivery. Dozens of House and Senate members are vowing to go to court, if necessary, to block any change in delivery frequency. Donahoe isn't budging. "We plan to do what we said we were going to do," he said.

Why is the USPS losing so much money?
First-class mail volume has dropped by more than 25 percent since 2006, as Americans embraced email and started paying bills and communicating with each other online. But more than two thirds of last year's colossal losses were caused by pension obligations. In 2006, Congress and the Bush administration passed a law requiring the then-profitable Postal Service to prepay, over the course of just 10 years, 75 years' worth of anticipated retiree health benefits. Fearing a future financial collapse and a taxpayer bailout, Republicans insisted on the provision to guarantee that the post office would meet its future obligations. No other government agency or private company, however, is required to fund future costs in this backbreaking way. The Postal Service has since made $49 billion in such payments, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has claimed that if the Postal Service were allowed to manage its own obligations, it "would be back in the black and posting profits."

Would that solve the problem?
No. A more conventional pension-funding system might eliminate current losses, but with mail volume dropping dramatically every year in a digital world, the Postal Service would still be on the road to insolvency. That's why, Donahoe says, the post office needs to cut costs across the board and alter its business model. Besides ending Saturday delivery, he wants to set up a new health-insurance system for employees, shut down 252 of the country's 487 mail-processing centers, slow delivery times, reduce business hours at 13,000 post offices, and eliminate 220,000 of 522,000 postal jobs.

http://news.yahoo.com/postal-saved-133000510.html

[Wayne Goodwin]

Our mail used to be sorted about 25 miles from hear . Two years ago they closed it down and moved over 200 miles from me . So my mail goes to the big place then they send it 200 miles back to me . Some employees moved down there . The rest were laid off with no hope of being rehired .

[Shadowman]

I would certainly be okay with no mail on Saturday or even four day delivery.  Right now the Post Office is being used as a political football. They used to operate in the black but over the last decade or two they have had to change to put in new security measures, especially after 9/11. Odd, four or five people killed by anthrax, we declare it a WMD and install anthrax detection equipment.  Still, try sending a letter from one end of the country to the other by FedEx or UPS for 46 cents.

[frenchy]

well the mail has the upper hand on small packages over ups or fedex but hasn't seen the light just yet .. if you like to shop online ( and more and more of us are as the computer becomes more and more widely used ) believe it or not there are still quite a few people who still don't have a computer or if they do don't really know how to use it ..so the numbers will only get bigger in time .. but i'll give you a simple case in point .. i wanted to ship a guitar body to someone and thought i'd try the us mail .. i mean after all ups will only be on your street if they have a delivery there that day .. the us mail will be there no matter what anyway because even if you don't have any mail someone on your street does .. so i tried to setup an account online ( i usually ship ups but they ..ehh its a long story ) so i want to ship this guitar body parcel post ground .. i'm on their site for an hour tryin to figure it out .. finally i have to call them up and ask whats wrong with your site ?? why is it so freakin hard to ship this parcel post ground ?? all it wants to do is ship it express mail ( which is way way way too expensive ) or priority which is better but still more than what i want to spend .. and the guy say well we can't do that online .. i said what ?? why is that ?? uhh .. i dunno .. but you can't do that from home .. so i said gee no wonder you guys are goin outta business .. its cause you're really stupid and he hung up on me .. now maybe just maybe if they made their site much more user friendly and let you choose how you want to ship somethin and if you wanna insure it or not .. they could have a pretty profitable business .. let their business morph with the times .. if they're smart enough to see an opportunity in this new world of consumer commerce we're livin in .. they already have the people and the trucks and they're there everyday , why not capitalize on that fact .. you can make more deliverin a small package than you can deliverin a stack of letters .. if they just did the math .. and they could probably take saturday off too if they wanted but if they didn't it would give em another leg up on ups and fedex .. or they could do like they do and charge more for saturday deliveries .. either way it could still be a win win .. 

[ProblemAgain]

but you see part of that problem is congress decided to privatize the post office....but not to relinquish being in charge...so they get all the minuses and none of the pluses. you really can't beat the post office tho for the price of  delivery compared to fedex or ups or dhl. and that may be why they have had such pressure put on them. oh and LOTS of post office jobs are no longer 'jobs' but are contracts and thus the 'employee' isn't looking forward to a retirement package and etc...

[Wayne Goodwin]

You are right using post office to send package . Price is good . Boxes are free and you can request a pickup at your home . Saving even more .

[Lifesighs]

My post office is 2 minutes away and never crowded so I do send packages thru them. I go get the right size box from them first, it's easy for me.

[frenchy]

mine is 2 minutes away too lifey but in the winter we have to deal with all the snowbirds gettin their mail forwarded back and forth and why didn't they get this or that .. in the summer its a bit better but lately there are more people who can't afford to stay in two places so they either leave or stay here .. and i think more stay than leave .. their kids probably visit em more if they can come to florida anyway in the winter . but its usually always assholes to elbows in the post office by me .. so i'll go to the local office depot which is further away but they give me the choice of ups or mail .. but the click and ship from here would be a lot easier for me . if they ever get it right .. priority mail to ship a guitar is usually more than ups or fedex so that don't work for me .. and the no insurance thing makes me nervous too .. i've only ever needed it once but once is enough to know that it can happen again .. and i pack pretty much bulletproof .. don't matter shit can still happen ..