JOIN OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER  

San Antonio Current home page.

Staff Blogs

Post Office cancels Saturday mail

February 6, 2013
By

usps.com

Postmaster General Patrick Donahue announced today that the United States Postal Service will no longer deliver mail on Saturdays.

The new “Six‐Day Package, Five‐Day Mail Delivery” scheduled to begin this August will save the floundering mail agency an estimated $2 billion a year. And they need it. The USPS has been struggling financially for years now, and managed to hemorrhage  nearly $16 billion last fiscal year.

The main issues? Paying for future retiree health benefits and the ever-strengthening grip of digital communication.

The agency ran into its legal borrowing limit last year and defaulted twice on payments to the federal government. Congress has not yet heeded the agency’s pleas to restructure its prepayments.

The USPS’ official press release claims that public support for the changes is strong:

“According to research conducted by the Postal Service and independent research by major news outlets, nearly seven out of ten Americans supported the Postal Service switching to a five‐day mail delivery schedule as a way to reduce costs — even before the Postal Service decided to continue package delivery on Saturday. Support is likely higher given that the Postal Service will maintain six‐day delivery for packages.“

How do you feel about the impending loss of Saturday mail?

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

  • redqueenself

    “the agency will continue to deliver packages,
    mail-order medicine and express mail on Saturdays. But letters, bills,
    cards, and catalogs won’t get to their recipients until Monday.” So how
    will this save money? Someone (my husband) will still
    have to run the route on Saturday. Right now, Ron is working 6 days a
    week every week until further notice because the mail is so heavy. This
    has been for the past 6 months. He works 10-12 hours a day. If he is
    only allowed to deliver some of the mail on Saturday, he will have to
    deliver the mail that is cut back on Mon-Fri. Does this mean he will
    now work 14 hours a day? He has been told the Post Office is not going
    to hire new carriers to deliver any of this mail. Somewhere…some
    manager is lousy with math.

  • redqueenself

    The
    Post Office legally has to prepay retirement benefits 75 years in
    advance. Now wonder they cant meet their budget! “The US Postal Service
    could avoid closings, firings, and cutbacks if the Chair of the House
    Government Reform Committee would stop blocking a bipartisan bill
    sponsored by 229 members that gives the Post Office the same 20-30 year
    pension pre-pay funding requirements as other federal agencies, instead
    of a Bush-signed bill that requires a 75 year prepayment leaving the
    Post Office with massive debt, says Robert Weiner , former spokesman of
    the Government Reform Committee before he became a spokesman in the
    Clinton White House.”

  • get _this_town_an_editor

    I’m just curious why I have yet to read an article produced by a San Antonio “news” publication that doesn’t have typos.

  • they have had it good too long

    They should have Saturday delivery..
    .Allow them to be off on Sundays and Mondays..
    That would force those to not like their job so much because the regulars are usually the ones w/ high seniority…Saturday work would push them into retirement….