Saturday mail delivery to end Aug. 1
By Debbi Wilgoren , Updated: February 6, 2013
The financially struggling U.S. Postal Service plans to stop delivering mail on Saturdays starting August 1, the agency is set to announce Wednesday.
This means that for the first time Americans will receive mail only five days a week, a significant shift for the storied mail agency, which has suffered tens of billions of dollars in losses in recent years with the advent of the Internet and e-commerce.
Post offices would remain open on Saturdays so that customers can drop off mail or packages, buy postage stamps, or access their post office boxes, officials said. Hours likely would be reduced at thousands of smaller locations, they said.
USPS also plans to continue Saturday delivery of packages, which remain a profitable and growing part of the delivery business. Post offices would remain open on Saturdays so that customers can drop off mail or packages, buy postage stamps, or access their post office boxes, officials said. But hours likely would be reduced at thousands of smaller locations, they said.
Canceling Saturday mail deliveries will save USPS $2 billion annually, according to congressional and postal officials, who confirmed the news ahead of a formal announcement.
The move has been expected for years, but is being announced absent explicit congressional approval, even though lawmakers have argued their consent is necessary in order to make the operational change. Postal officials are expected to argue Wednesday that they do not need congressional action in order to halt Saturday delivery.
The Postal Service said that it suffered a $15.9 billion net loss for fiscal 2012, which ended Sept. 30. That's three times the loss recorded a year earlier.
A majority of Americans support ending Saturday mail, according to national polls conducted in recent years, and President Obama has proposed halting deliveries as part of his budget-cutting proposals. Though the Postal Service is a quasi-governmental, self-funding entity, its worker compensation and retirement plans are tied to the federal budget.
Lawmakers have tried unsuccessfully for years to enact a significant overhaul of the Postal Service, hoping to reshape the agency as a leaner organization that delivers mail less frequently and operates fewer post offices across the country.
The Senate last year passed a bipartisan measure that would have permitted an end to Saturday mail delivery only after USPS conducted two years of feasibility studies. But postal officials — and some GOP lawmakers — opposed that plan, arguing that reams of professional studies and a declining balance sheet already proved that the change was needed. A Republican-backed postal reform bill cleared a key committee last year, but was never considered by the full House. The GOP bill would have permitted ending Saturday mail deliveries within a year's time.
Opposition to significant changes rests mostly with lawmakers from far-flung rural communities, who fear that a change in schedules could jeopardize low-cost delivery of medicines and medical supplies to elderly customers. The publishing industry also has complained that any changes would force quicker magazine publication deadlines and require some publishers to seek private delivery options instead, likely raising newsstand prices.
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