Cutbacks on mail delivery

The U.S. Postal Service announced this week that it would dramatically scale back services in a bid to save itself from bankruptcy. The post office said it would seek Congress’s approval to eliminate next-day delivery for first-class mail and to slow down other mail service. Letters and postcards would take at least two days to deliver, and commercial mail such as periodicals up to nine days. The USPS also wants to shut over half of its 487 mail processing centers starting in March and to eliminate around 28,000 jobs. The postal service lost $5.1 billion last year because of large pension obligations and rapidly shrinking postal volumes, and faces bankruptcy if it does not restructure and cut costs. “You can’t continue to run red ink and not make changes,” said Patrick Donahoe, the postmaster general.

The USPS is committing suicide by a thousand cuts, said John Nichols in TheNation.com. Downgrading service will only hasten its demise, not save it. Cutting next-day delivery will push even more customers over to the Internet, and presents private companies with an “open invitation” to take away even more of the postal service’s business. “Americans are almost being pushed into the arms of UPS and FedEx.”

So why not let one of them just buy the USPS? said NationalReview.com in an editorial. A private owner could return the postal service to profitability by focusing exclusively on services that “customers are willing to pay for” and breaking up the labor unions whose insistence on “unusually high salaries and benefits” is bankrupting the service. “There is no reason for the government to run a mail company.”

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But as long as it does, said Maurice McTigue in NYTimes.com, Congress needs to stand back and let the USPS “make sound business decisions.” Lawmakers have failed for years to grant the postal service the authority to make smarter moves, such as ending Saturday delivery, charging more for postage stamps, and opening branches in convenient locations like “grocery stores, malls, and pharmacies.” The USPS could still save itself—but only if it’s allowed to “act like a real business.”