No More Saturday Mail?

photo: credit flickr.com

by Jeffrey Payne
edited by Abbie Tumbleson

Students at Franklin Pierce are used to not getting mail on Saturdays, unlike the rest of the world; but what if mail wasn’t delivered on Saturday anywhere?

On March 2, the United States Postal Service proposed eliminating Saturday mail deliveries to Congress. According to The Associated Press, the USPS is looking at deficits of up to $238 billion in ten years and $7 billion in this coming year alone. This has caused the USPS to come up with a variety of plans to prevent these losses; plans that include closing post offices, raising postal rates and, most importantly, cancelling Saturday mail deliveries.

These are tough times economically and it’s easy to see how cutting an entire work day would help save a decent amount of money for the postal service. However what about the repercussions on the public?

“I think it’ll upset the public. When you are expecting something in the mail and you have to wait Saturday and Sunday that’s unbelievable. It’s going to mess up a lot of businesses because their products might not ship in time,” said Franklin Pierce Senior Latazewanna Pierre.

It certainly is a drastic change to go from receiving mail six days a week to five. While it sounds like a great idea to cut costs, is it really a solution that can fix the financial state of the USPS?

The Associated Press reports that the post office has already cut over 200,000 full time employees in the past year, bringing the number from 800,000 to 600,000. They are also working to eliminate a new requirement which forces them to spend $5.5 billion to prepay expected medical benefits for retirees. The USPS is working towards returning to its original standard of handling the cost on a pay-as-you-go basis.

It sounds like a great idea to cut costs by eliminating an entire day of deliveries, but that option carries a heavy backlash. Now people will have one less opportunity to receive their mail which could contain very important deliveries. The USPS is losing money due to a higher use of technology to communicate. With one less day of deliveries, people may turn even further from the USPS. If someone needs bills or a letter delivered in a short period around the weekend, they won’t want to have to wait for it to arrive on Monday. This could cause more people to turn to alternative delivery sources causing the postal office to lose more money than it saves.

The USPS should concentrate on changing the $5.5 billion pre-pay plan back for now and looking into other alternative options. Rushing into discontinuing Saturday mail delivery is a drastic measure which could cause more harm in the long run.