The US Postal Service may lose $7 billion this year, which may mean the closing of 1,000 post offices across the country and the elimination of Saturday delivery. Here’s a more radical suggestion: we don’t need daily residential mail service anymore, so cut it back to every other day.
With e-mail and texting and cell phones, who writes letters anymore? So much of our life has moved online that the only mail I get these days is pure junk, and there’s no urgency in getting that to my mailbox, just so I can carry it inside and throw it in the trash. The only mail I get that doesn’t get tossed immediately is a magazine or two and the occasional birthday card, and none of that is so time-sensitive that I can’t wait a day to see it. Even the few bills that still come with a stamp on them give me enough of a grace period to pay that the delayed delivery would have no impact.
Wouldn’t this mean lots of letter carriers and other postal employees being laid off? Yes, but the way the USPS is going, they’re going to lose their jobs anyway.