Salon.com > U.S. Postal Service

Postal service delays plan to cut Saturday delivery

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:02:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Postal Service says it will delay plans to cut Saturday mail delivery because Congress isn't allowing the change.

The Postal Service said in February that it planned to cut back in August to five-day-a-week deliveries for everything except packages, as a way to hold down losses.

But a statement Wednesday from agency's Board of Governors notes that Congress has passed a spending bill that continues the long-time prohibition against reducing delivery days.

As a result, the board says it believe that Congress "has left it with no choice but to delay implementation" of the five-day-a-week plan.

Congress — not email — destroyed the Postal Service

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 23:32:00 +0000

You know that feeling of pleasure you get when you see someone stand up to a bullying, incompetent boss? It’s viscerally satisfying, isn’t it?

That’s the way I felt this morning when I heard Postmaster General Patrick Donahue announce that the U.S. Postal Service intended to move forward with a plan to stop Saturday delivery of mail, effective sometime in August. In doing so, Donahue stuck his thumb in the eye of the U.S. Congress, the mail agency’s ultimate boss. Bravo, Mr. Donahue.

You may think I have incorrectly identified the incompetent party here. After all, it’s a deeply ingrained part of Americans’ worldview that our postal service is the epitome of inefficiency and bad management, the perfect example of a bungling, poorly run government bureaucracy. That view gets reinforced from all kinds of sources – jaded journalists, editorial cartoonists given more to clichés than to cleverness, free-market economists, and others.

NH post office cuts hours

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 15:30:00 +0000

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Express service might be all you have time for at one New Hampshire post office.

The hours at the post office in Sugar Hill have recently been cut back to 30 minutes a day, down from a few hours. The post office is open from 10:15 to 10:45 each morning.

New Hampshire’s two U.S. senators have written a letter urging the U.S. Postal Service to hold a community meeting in the northern New Hampshire town so that residents, government officials and business owners can ask questions and offer their thoughts on the future of retail postal service there.