Saturday mail delivery to be discontinued
By CBS-DC
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service is discontinuing delivery of first class mail on Saturdays by Aug. 1. Priority mail and packages will still be delivered six days a week.
The move is expected to save the financially struggling agency roughly $2 billion annually.
While delivery of traditional mail has declined steadily, the shipment of packages has risen by 14 percent since 2010, the Associate Press reports.
Under the plan, which will be formally announced later today, Saturday delivery to post office boxes will continue. In addition, those post offices currently offering Saturday hours will continue to operate on a six-day schedule.
The Postal Service has long eyed five-day mail delivery, but has been unsuccessful in changing operations until this point. It is not immediately clear how the agency will cease Saturday deliveries without congressional approval.
Nearly 7 in 10 Americans are in favor of the move as a cost-cutting measure according to an AP report.
Should have been done YEARS ago! The USPS has been upside down for near 30 years.
In France they only deliver mail to your house. When you want to send mail you go to a dropbox or the postoffice. This way the delivery person only has to handle mail to be delivered. Seems to make some sense.
We didn’t have postal service on Saturdays in the early 70’s. I guess it was in the late 70s or early 80s that the postal service began Saturday service. If you think back to the 70s you’ll remember that very few banks opened on Saturdays. Then, later, nearly all of them expanded hours into Saturday. I think (with few exceptions) we’ll adapt to the change back to no Saturday service. And we’ll get along just fine.
I’m good with it…