America’s second-largest employer is in dire straits and it’s all the Internet’s fault.
The U.S. Postal Service is facing an $8.3 billion budget shortfall this year, in large part because of losing almost half of its first class mail to online bill pay and email communication.
After laying off 110,000 employees and cutting $12 billion over the past four years, the service is now looking to end mail delivery on Saturdays, a move it said would save $3.1 billion per year.
“That’s savings that we desperately need,” said U.S. Postal Service spokesman David Partenheimer. “It’s not the only thing we need to do to get out of the financial hole but it is very important.”
According to a 2009 Gallup Poll 66 percent of Americans are OK with the postal service cutting mail delivery on Saturdays, but far fewer support paying more for their mail.
Just 38 percent of respondents were in favor of raising stamp prices and less than half, or 48 percent supported pumping tax revenues into the mail system.
But even within the postal system, there is disagreement over whether a five-day delivery system will actually solve the problem. Despite not delivering mail, post offices would stay open, express or overnight mail would still be delivered and P.O. boxes would still receive mail.
The Postal Regulatory Commission, a president-appointed agency that oversees the Postal Services’ operations to ensure it doesn’t abuse its monopoly, estimated that cutting a delivery day would take three years to fully implement and would only save $1.7 billion per year thereafter.
“The key factor is that the Postal Service thinks it can take all the mail that it would otherwise deliver on Saturday and deliver it on Monday with no extra cost,” said regulatory commission chairman Ruth Goldway. “When we look at the operations it just can’t happen.”
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article courtesy of ABCNews.com
