That’s a bit of an over-simplification. Sure the number of parcels won’t change much, but the overhead of moving them and the associated costs will change quite a bit. The USPS is in a dying business. The number of parcels per year is decreasing and they are continuously moving toward having excess capacity in their trucks and planes. Dropping a day of delivery should increase the daily load, use up excess capacity, and possibly improve the overhead costs by keeping the business in the sweet-spot.
Consider a single truck route. As each year goes by the number of parcels decreases. The truck begins to be under-utilized. To compensate, the truck’s route is increased. However, since the route is longer it takes longer to service. You can extend the mailman’s schedule so that he can finish his route, but there is a limit to how many hours he can work. At some point the route is too long for a single mailman and it has to be broken back into two routes. If you drop service on one day, you increase the load on the other days, fill up the trucks, decrease the time they are on the road, and save money.
A similar savings might be available for airplanes, but maybe these are already optimized for cost savings.
You can get similar savings by closing the post offices for day. The day’s overhead costs are saved (e.g. lights) and the daily tasks can be performed one day less (e.g. opening and closing the office). The office will be busier during the rest of the day, but maybe the staff currently has a lot of downtime anyway.
These seem like reasonable ways to save money without reducing the number of parcels. Considering the USPS is in a business that is fading away, it seems like a perfectly reasonable way of gracefully moving with the times.
This. Good Mail includes stuff I’ve ordered online (yay!), catalogs, magazines, the occasional card or letter… Even junk mail I don’t mind that much—it’s a lesser evil than spam or phone solicitations, because it costs the mailer more to mail it than it costs me to toss it (and they’re helping to subsidize the delivery of the Good Stuff). Even bills I don’t mind getting, because I’d rather go ahead and see how much I owe and pay it off than to have the monetary obligation still out there somewhere.
So, I’m all for continued mail delivery. But, if they do have to skip a day to keep costs down, so be it.
Why? I would have thought that, as more people order things online that they would have formerly bought in brick-and-mortar stores, the number of parcels would be increasing.
Well good point. My reasoning is that email and fax have displaced the letter. Package shipments are, as you said, likely up, but I am not sure if they are up enough to offset the loss of letters; especially since packages are handled by the other carriers.
At the very least, there has been a dramatic shift in the types of traffic that is mailed.
Also most of the stuff I order online arrives by FedEx and UPS and half the time I do not get a choice in who delivers my packages but when I do I choose FedEx or UPS.
The PO needs to remain open; otherwise people who work all day will have trouble getting to the post office.
The post office is still usually the cheapest way to send anything. It loses money only because it is required to provide service to all communities every day. You can bet that FedEx or UPS would hate to have the PO go under – it would hurt their bottom line considerably.
I’m all for no Saturday delivery. It’d be nice to finally have a weekend off with my husband more than once every six weeks. His usual schedule as a letter carrier is that each week he has off on Sunday plus another day off that rotates.
It would increase the load on the carriers, so I think the USPS is kidding themselves about how much it would save in terms of reducing the workforce. As it is now, many of the older letter carriers that I know - and by that I mean mid-40s and up - have had at least one joint replaced. I’ve already picked out where my husband will be going for his near-inevitable joint replacements. Working the carriers harder on their current routes, rather than allowing for some route reassignments and making the routes each a bit shorter then adding a route or so per office, will just exact a greater toll on the ability of the carriers to continue doing their jobs for as long as they do.
It would definitely suck to lose Saturdays here at work - we’re a busy library periodicals department and when there’s a Monday holiday we get bins and bins and bins of newspapers and magazines. If they need to close a day it should be Wednesday.
I’d be disappointed, but not distraught, if they ended Saturday delivery. But I’d be really bummed if the closed the offices on Saturday. When I have to mail packages or whatever, that’s when I usually do it.
Unless FedEx or UPS were somehow legally obligated to provide service to every address the way the USPS is, I don’t see how the elimination of one of their competitors would hurt their bottom line.
End Saturday delivery. If you need your mail, you can pick it up at the P.O.
I’m all for ending Saturday delivery. Where I live, mail carriers have to work 6 days a week for at least the first year of their employment. Give them a 2-day weekend; they deserve it.
I know the majority of folks don’t actually work 9-5, but those that do might appreciate being able to GET to the post office without having to take a day off to do so.
I think dropping Saturday delivery wouldn’t hurt, but I imagine they’d really want Mondays to be a much longer work day, staying open much later, so people can actually get in there who couldn’t otherwise. Also, still just as much mail to process, but fewer days to do it in, so…yah.
Maybe fewer-days-but-longer business hours might be the ticket.
Most people rarely work to capacity so I don’t think it’d hurt the bottom line to drop a day. Workers would just work a full day instead of only 6 of 8 hours. I’ve done a lot of time and motion studies and most worker goof off a lot.
This is why you can cut back on workforce and still get the jobs done. That is providing you have people willing to work.
I had one job I left and years later I ran into the H/R director and she told me she still can’t figure out why they had to hire two full time and a part time employee to replace me.
I want to keep Saturday delivery. The number one reason is for Netflix. Yes, I know there is streaming available, but most of the physical disks I get are either obscure dvds that aren’t likely to be available on demand or blu ray, which has a much higher quality than any streaming system available.
Also, since I have a small apartment complex mailbox, I’d hate for 2 days of mail to be stuffed into the mailbox. During Christmas and election time, I can barely get the mail out from one day with all the catalogs and election fliers. I also get catalogs and election fliers from people who lived in my apartment 5 years ago and election fliers from places I haven’t lived in 5 years!
We’ve noticed for years that we get very little Saturday mail, so it won’t bother us much at all. Will they still be picking up from the blue corner mailboxes, though? Hope so.
The current cost for first class mail is amazingly cheap. The cost for junk mail is even cheaper.
Increase both of those, and keep my Saturday deliveries.
With Saturday delivery, I can get 2 Netflix movies a week. Remove a day, and I can’t do that any more. It takes 6 days/week of mail movement to do this.
Yeah. It probably doesn’t apply to a huge number of people, but if you work days, if you don’t have home delivery, and if the post office (where you have a box) is only open when you’re working, Saturday’s the only day you could pick up your mail.
I’m thinking of people like the trucker who lives down the street. He’s only home on weekends, and we have to get our mail at the post office.