Post office may cut back deliveries to 5 days a week By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID Associated Press Jan. 28, 2009, 2:44PM http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hotstories/6234804.html WASHINGTON — Massive deficits could force the post office to cut out one day of mail delivery per week, the postmaster general told Congress today. Postmaster General John E. Potter asked lawmakers to lift the requirement that the agency deliver mail six days a week. Something else to blame on our new leader!
I fail to see why to blame Obama for this nor why this is a bad thing. One less day a week to get annoying junk mail.
Damn good idea, better than raising price of a stamp every 6 months or so. Every other shipping company is just 5 days a week for regular service, makes perfect sense.
Finally a topic of which I know a little bit. Don't expect this to pass easily. While you and I would probably not miss a few days of extra service, we are not the issue. Many companies depend on regular postal service. Some parts of the country (mostly rural) also depend on it. You can expect Senators from mostly rural states, and many representatives of rural districts or districts with heavy mail using companies to object to any cutbacks. The Postal service has attempted cutbacks before. I believe at one time they wanted to cut back Wednesday, not Saturday (to avoid having two days in a row without service) but I'm not sure if my source on that was from the Postal Service itself. It's been many years. If done, it would enable the Postal Service to reduce a large fixed cost with little effect on revenue. Which is why they want the cutback. (I can imagine that the resulting layoffs would be politically unpopular, especially during the current crisis. Another factor to weigh.)
As long as they hold their government protected monopoly on first class mail, we should decide how many days a week they operate.
I want this to happen because it will annoy the shit out of my boss, the Evil Troll. The idiot has this weird fascination with mail. He goes to the office every Saturday to see the mail. Every day he looks at every piece of mail that comes in, regardless of whom it's addressed to. On weekdays when mail is lighter than he thinks it should be someone calls the post office to see if there's anymore and if there is, he sends an intern to pick it up. He gets as excited as a schoolgirl when we get checks in the mail despite the fact that, as a commercial landlord, he gets the exact same checks in month after month. On federal holidays he's like a caged bear because there isn't any mail or banking. He usually babbles on about lazy people and lost millions. This is only reason 1043 that I've quit my job.
Seriously. I didn't care about this issue one way or the other, but after Alice's post, I'm with her on this one.
my mailman already seems to take one day each week off, I guess this just means he will no longer be paid for it It doesn't seem like this would reduce costs for salaried employees, but I believe all carriers are per-hour. They must be, or it would make no sense to stop delivering (unless it is for the cost of gasoline savings). Alice does your boss know that mail moves and is sorted on Sundays, but he just cannot get it delivered? You should make sure he knows it is just piling up in the post office
I could write a book. Seriously. I hope that after he's dead his ex-employees get together and write one. Imagine working for a very spoiled 6-year-old in a 76-year-old man's body and you come close to what he's like.
LOL - that will make crazy! I'll be sure to slip this in somehow. The one saving grace of working for this man is that I got to meet a certain US national team goalkeeper with the initials KK. He's kinda tiny in person.
They are absolutely beautiful, you would love it. Don't bother trying to learn any Portuguese though. The portuguese they speak is not taught in books. It sounds more like the garble resulting from shoving a rag in a two year olds mouth.
I think they have a supply of extra mailmen whose job is to pick up that 6th day for the regulars' day off. So a lot of jobs will most likely be lost, which is a bummer, but there's a lot of that going around...
Oh, I forgot to mention that we don't get our M-F mail directly from the post office. We have a courier service that goes to the PO in the morning and picks it up and delivers it to us by 9am. If we waited for the post office we might not get the mail until the afternoon.