“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas


Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Going postal....but not on Saturdays

The USPS lost like a quarter of a billion dollars just in Q4 of last year. Somethings got to give. Maybe it's this.....

Postmaster General John Potter said Tuesday that he intends to seek congressional approval to cut Saturday delivery as part of a wide-ranging plan to close a multi-billion dollar budget gap.

Though the idea of cutting service from six to five days has gotten a cool reception on Capitol Hill, Potter said that the plan would include enough flexibility so that customers who need Saturday service can get it and that this and other changes need to be implemented for the Postal Service to survive.


The argument for continuing the Saturday delivery service is that commercial businesses might suffer without it. But, a vast majority of the cost of Saturday postal service is residential-based so, perhaps the commercial deliveries could remain for a time until the businesses make adjustments.

Honestly, I wouldn't miss the mail if it ran only once a week. That's about how often we bother to retrieve it, much to the annoyance of our delivery guy.

5 comments:

Bill said...

You must not be a magazine reader. I'm old enough to enjoy holding one far more than reading a computer screen.

Ed said...

I prefer to read on paper, anything that's more than a page long. At home I read library books far more than magazines so I don't depend on the mail necessarily to deliver my reading material. If I ever start taking Discover, Pop.Mech, or Playboy, I'll depend on the mail to deliver more to me than crap and bills, which is all I get now.

Bill said...

National Review and The Weekly Standard. Indespensible!

David said...

I read books on a Kindle ereader. Love it. I skim what magazines interest me: most are junk. Newspapers are for fish.

If my mailbox were to be vanadalized/removed by errant teens I don't think I would miss it. When I was a kid I loved getting mail so much I would send off for catalogs and buy junk from the likes of Johnson Smith and J.C. Whitney. But no more: it's all eBay and Craig's List now.

Did you here AT&T is requesting to stop delivering the White Pages! i haven't used a phone book in ten years! In fact, when the phone books are delivered to my house they go straight to the trash can. I don't even take the plastic off.

Why AT&T has to ask anyone to make a business decision is asinine. Phone books should have been relegated to the Smithonian immediately following Al Gore's invention of the Internet.

In fact, I venture to exclaim phone books are for chumps... and Nathan R. Johnson.

Scary: type your home phone number into the Google search box.

Ed said...

I used to order X-ray vision glasses, pepper gum, and hand-shake buzzers from the back of comic books just to get some mail. It was always exciting until I realized the glasses didn't work worth a crap. The pepper gum and hand-shake buzzers did though.