all the ones round here except ONE are rental properties...
Posted on 01/24/2011 12:28:06 PM PST by Justaham
The U.S. Postal Service plays two roles in America: an agency that keeps rural areas linked to the rest of the nation, and one that loses a lot of money.
Now, with the red ink showing no sign of stopping, the postal service is hoping to ramp up a cost-cutting program that is already eliciting yelps of pain around the country. Beginning in March, the agency will start the process of closing as many as 2,000 post offices, on top of the 491 it said it would close starting at the end of last year. In addition, it is reviewing another 16,000—half of the nation's existing post offices—that are operating at a deficit, and lobbying Congress to allow it to change the law so it can close the most unprofitable among them. The law currently allows the postal service to close post offices only for maintenance problems, lease expirations or other reasons that don't include profitability.
The news is crushing in many remote communities where the post office is often the heart of the town and the closest link to the rest of the country. Shuttering them, critics say, also puts an enormous burden on people, particularly on the elderly, who find it difficult to travel out of town.
The postal service argues that its network of some 32,000 brick-and-mortar post offices, many built in the horse-and-buggy days, is outmoded in an era when people are more mobile, often pay bills online and text or email rather than put pen to paper. It also wants post offices to be profitable to help it overcome record $8.5 billion in losses in fiscal year 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
This is terrible. If they close the little mini post office in the BP station, I’ll have to go almost an entire additional block to get to the nearest post office.
If your definition of a small town is one that includes coffee shops, diners, and a WalMart, you don’t know from small towns!
I have lived in a small town. It had the Post Office, 2 grocery stores and a service station. That was it. Folks would have to drive @ 10 miles to find a diner. Or another 25-30 miles for a WalMart.
I can certainly do without the crap mail...which is MOST of it, on a daily basis.
The problem is that the P.O. in Newberry on the upper peninsula of Michigan is what will get closed. And it'll be 20 miles to the next one.
Here in NJ there's a new small town every few miles down Route 22, and each has a Post Office. Half of the P.O.s in this area could close without major impact. And unless that map above is listing every public mailbox, there's a PO in Manhattan every 5 blocks.
But the U.P. of Michigan has fewer voters than Central NJ or Manhattan, so that's what's going to get closed. Murphy has a law about that ...
all the ones round here except ONE are rental properties...
I live on a rural route. We only get mail 3 times a week. I get my meds in the mail otherwise I would have to drive over 160 miles round trip to the Rx.
Pick any small town in the Great Basin. Towns of 200 to 2000 people, surrounded by 50 to 100 miles of nothing in most any direction.
Pick small towns in Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho, eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, the very northeast part of California, eastern Colorado, north eastern New Mexico, etc.
There’s lots of places where it is a pretty fair haul to the next town and the next post office.
Oh, that might work. But it'd be cheaper to keep the small local PO, and cut one of the bigger POs in that larger town. But even FEDEX and UPS have smaller drop-off sites for places not so close to one of their larger buildings. When the local PO is just a desk inside the local grocery store 20 miles from the real PO, is it really going to save that much to shut it down?
Post Offices used to be a patronage pit, and were sited by population counts to make sure that there were enough jobs to pass out. That mis-configuration problem has never been addressed.
It's a lot easier to improve efficiency at the over-built, over-staffed bigger cities than to cut out the smallest towns.
There are several POs that could be closed here in Aiken County, SC. Several of them truly are not worth a stinking damn!
Bump!
I’ll think outloud too: For a government agency I have to say that it is probably the best. I don’t ever recall to have had a lost letter and for 40 some cents you can send a one within 2-3 days anywhere in USA. They do need to cut some costs and compete better on shipping with FedEx and UPS but closing them would be a mistake, IMO. Considering how much they benefit the economy, a few billion a year in subsidies would be a much better investment than crappy earmarks.
Dutch Harbor and Unalaska are almost one and the same town. Dutch Harbor has a post office and less then a mile away just around the corner Unalaska has a Post Office also. Both towns together do not have more than 1000 residents.
Delivery limited to 3x’s per week.
And these are the kooks who want to run our HEALTH system!
My box is at a contract USPS outlet. They close an hour for lunch in the afternoon but they are actually open more total hours than the "regular" main PO. The only thing they can't do is passports.
Just pointing it out.
I hear ya. Here's what I wrote on another postal thread:
10,000 government agencies with no constitutional basis, and we get thread after thread after thread deriding one of the few that is specifically mentioned.
I mean seriously?
Obviously you are not aware that FedEx and UPS bring the packages they don’t want to drive to the sticks to the Post Office for delivery. One of those dirty little secrets they don’t want you to know.
End Saturday delivery, relocate stand alone post offices to inside of Walmart, let Fedex and UPS handle the package side of the business. With 90% of the mail going from the box to the trashcan as pure junk, how much actual mail is relevant?
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