Opinion: Closing USPS’ Reno center will create more postal issues
Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the Dec. 2, 2011, Reno Gazette-Journal.
Forty years ago, Federal Express (now FedEx) discovered that there was money to be made by promising shippers that a parcel sent today could be in its recipient’s hands tomorrow … anywhere in the country.
In those same 40 years, the U.S. mail has gotten slower, not faster, even as the cost of stamps has steadily increased. For Northern Nevadans, it will get even slower if a proposal to close the Reno sorting center is accepted by U.S. Postal Service officials.
The Postal Service’s answer to its serious financial problems seems to be making service worse rather than better.
The result will be to chase away even more customers — to email, bill-paying services and to FedEx or UPS — until there’s no one left to prop up a dying service.
Before the USPS closes the Reno center and sends all local mail to Sacramento for sorting, including mail that has to be sent right back to Nevada, Congress should insist that the quasi-governmental agency complete a top-to-bottom rethinking of its mission and how it can meet it many years into the future. Right now, it is clearly heading in the wrong direction.
The Postal Service’s problems are very real. It is losing money by the bucket load, and the model first put into place by Benjamin Franklin more than two centuries ago clearly doesn’t work anymore.