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Time to stock up on those forever stamps and anything you want from your local post office.
HOLMES MILL, Ky.—The U.S. Postal Service plays two roles in America: an agency that keeps rural areas linked to the rest of the nation, and one that loses a lot of money.
Now, with the red ink showing no sign of stopping, the postal service is hoping to ramp up a cost-cutting program that is already eliciting yelps of pain around the country. Beginning in March, the agency will start the process of closing as many as 2,000 post offices, on top of the 491 it said it would close starting at the end of last year. In addition, it is reviewing another 16,000—half of the nation's existing post offices—that are operating at a deficit, and lobbying Congress to allow it to change the law so it can close the most unprofitable among them. The law currently allows the postal service to close post offices only for maintenance problems, lease expirations or other reasons that don't include profitability.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704881304576094000352599050.html
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Or, cheapncheerful, they will wait out the leases and slowly close them as they expire. If they don't renew them, then there's no post office. Simple and maybe even faster than waiting for legislation to be enacted. They'll find a way. Unfortunately.
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And what becomes of all those postal employees? That's rotten. Most postal workers I know have been in those jobs for decades. It's a lifetime kind of job. I hope they provide some kind of retraining for them because postmaster skills aren't so easily transferable as say if you've worked in a call center or at a checkout all your life.
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I would rather see them cut delivery days than close post offices. They could always charge a premium rate to those that want to send time-sensitive material. I could count on one hand how many time sensitive pieces of mail I've received in the last year. Isn't that a better option than swinging the axe?
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I'd say so, Savannah. Think of all the leaseholders for the properties too that will see their regular rent disappear. Just what we need, more empty commercial buildings. Nothing makes a town look more run down.
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Well, that sucks! We have a small rural one here and that's it. I don't send mail through it often but I do get books (and freebies of course) delivered via mine all the time. My mailman and I have joked before about how my parcels are what keeps that small branch open. Fingers crossed that turns out to be true.
I saw it coming long ago when their numbers were bad. Remember them talking about cutting the Saturday delivery completely because of the reduced volume? That was the red flag for me and a year or maybe two ago now. This would be the next logical step. Now all they need to do is figure out how to get around those laws, which will be a piece of cake because the government will just amend them to suit I bet. Shame.
The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments. - Mad Magazine.