No more USPS deliveries on Saturday!

[GoingPostal]

Yes it's true starting the week of Aug. 5th the plan is to have eliminate street delivery of mai on saturdaysl but still deliver Express, Priority, and 1st Class, whether they deliver Parcel Post is still up in the air. This also means that mail will not go out on Saturdays, so if you miss the outgoing mail on Friday it won't go out till Monday. USPS blans to save 2 billion dollars with this move. but i wouldn't count on this happening becasue lot of people going to lose jobs and congress may not like that.

Now let me respond to a couple of points made.

Hell.. FedX actually delivers a whole lot of your mail.. they entered into a $70B contract with the USPS a few years back to help them move the mail..
On any given day of the week, my local USPS has a line with at least 10 people in it.. and at least a 15 minute wait to get served.. there will either be 2 or 3 postal clerks standing there helping people.. There is no reason 3 people cant process 10 customers in 15 minutes.. Grocery stores do it all the time, with customers bringing 10x amount of goods to the counter.. The clerks move slow.. ask a million questions.. take constant breaks.. and do everything they can to work at a pace well below what any other industry would accept...move mail over to the private sector.. and I bet you my next paycheck that the cost will decrease.. and the service will improve..

the USPS also delivers a lot of packages for FedEx as well (fedex smartpost), including saturdays which is why package delivery will remain as to honor the contract with both FedEx and UPS.

Lots of reasons that lines move slow. Some of the common reasons are customers not having all the forms/information they need when the get up to the window expecting the clerk to do it. imagine in your grocery store scenario that every customer geting to the register decides to go and get one more thing, the line would move slow.
The computer is just working slow on heavy mailing days the system sometimes bogs down. They are required to ask all those questions, they don't want to, it that they have to. You may think they are taking breaks but really they are going to handle all the mail in the back that needs to get out that day

But UPS and Fedex also don't have to deal with making deliveries to every single house everyday regardless if the mail is just a crappy flyer from the local Chinese take out place.

You say crap but those ads you get are some of USPS biggest customers

Cant see that it would be all that difficult to move the rest of the people over to the private sector and just kill the beast that is the USPS.. the infrastructure is already in place, and is already both efficient and profitable..

The Government has been looking for years for someone in the private sector to purchase the USPS haven't been able to find anyone willing to buy it.

I'm a little surprised they did Saturday, because my understanding was that statistically Tuesdays are the lowest mail day. But I guess businesses would find it harder to manage only getting mail four days a week.

The reason they went with saturday is not to tick off buisness customers, they mainly opperate mon-fri so it won't have much of an impact.

 

[mdwest]

I hear what youre saying goingpostal... but....

I would agree with your assessment of why lines can potentially move slow....

however.. this isnt a one off occasion I am talking about... we are talking about every single time I go to the post office (at least once a week.. sometimes 2-3 times)... simply put, they have 4 different clerks that I see behind the counter normally.. at any given time there are 2-3 working.. of those 4 clerks.. 3 of them are absolutely terrible employees whose refusal to move at anything other than a snails pace at anything they do would not be tolorated in the private sector.. one of them obviously hates her job.. the other two I dont know what the deal is other than no one is holding them to a standard.. so they dont have any motivation to reach one... it is a pathetic site.. the frustration among the customers is obvious.. people openly complain, grunt, huff, and bitch loudly, regularly... no one is doing anything about it though.. or appears to care...

regarding USPS trying to sell off to the private sector.. thats only partially true.. there are plenty of potential buyers.. what there are not a lot of is buyers willing to pay the price the US government wants to fetch for a failing business and the regulatory control the government wants to continue to assume over the buyer.... if the government offered the opportunity at the right price, and would allow the purchaser to actually run the business post purchase that would allow them to make a profit.. companies would be lining up and fighting over the opportunity..