I Could Live With Ending Saturday Mail Delivery

I heard that Congress has voted once again to prevent the Postal Service from ending Saturday delivery service. The USPS has been requesting an end to Saturday deliveries for some time to help end its deficits, which ran to $16 billion last year alone.

Ending regular Saturday deliveries is the single best thing the USPS could do to get out of red ink. The other easiest thing to do is to raise postage rates, but that would reduce business. “Forever” stamps don’t mean raising rates forever!

Why did Congress vote against ending Saturday deliveries? The only reason I can think of is to please voters in their home districts and states. Still, those voters will eventually have to pay higher postage rates, so they’ll get hit one way or the other.

I personally wouldn’t miss Saturday deliveries to any great degree. Sure, it’s nice to have, but I can wait until Monday.

Here’s the way the letter carrier system worked back when I worked for the post office, and I assume it’s still run that way today: Every letter carrier assigned to a regular route works five-day weeks. They have rotating days off. Then there are so-called “swing” carriers who deliver other carriers’ routes on the other carriers’ days off. Ending Saturday deliveries would eliminate the swing carriers’ jobs, saving a lot of money. I hate to see carriers lose their jobs, but perhaps they could move to other postal jobs when other employees retire.

However, the USPS could still process mail on Friday night, and businesses which absolutely needed their mail on Saturday could pick it up at post offices or via post office boxes. Mail could still be sorted to all post office boxes and post offices could still be open for business on Saturdays. It might be a good idea for Express Mail to be delivered on Saturdays. Mail could still be collected from street collection boxes on Saturdays.

Back around 1970 (when I began working for the USPS) the old Post Office Department became the Postal Service, with a mandate (after a few years) to pay its own way. Prior to that time, Congress subsidized post office operations. The post office became a government corporation and was supposed to become independent. That goal has been elusive, as seen by Congress interfering with ending Saturday deliveries.  Stop meddling!

When I joined the Postal Service, there was a lot of waste. But the organization gradually tightened things up, and eventually even hired an outside company to test how long mail took to be delivered – all across the country. Just about the time a verified, very high percentage of mail was being delivered on time, the Internet and email came on the scene, and we all know how that has affected First-Class Mail volumes (the bread and butter of the Postal Service’s revenue).

One answer is to completely privatize the Postal Service and take it out from under the government’s wing entirely. But that would open mail delivery to just about anyone, which could kill the USPS, because the USPS delivers to virtually everywhere in the U.S. – including far-away Alaska and Hawaii and overseas military installations – and to isolated farms and small towns – where it operates at a loss.

To look at another example, if the USPS was privatized and a local company was allowed to compete here in Dixon – charging 46 cents (the current First-Class letter-mail rate) to deliver letters just within the city of Dixon, this company would make money, compared to the USPS, which would have to also deliver 46-cent letters from Dixon to small towns in Maine, to villages in northern Alaska, or to GIs in Afghanistan.  

Also, the USPS operates post offices in many small towns where the offices operate at a loss.

For better or for worse, the uniform 46-cent stamp for letter mail means that many First-Class Mail users subsidize other First-Class Mail users.  

Congress should remove its legislative oversight of the Postal Service and let it make its own decisions.