Nation

Rain, sleet or snow can’t stop mail — but cutbacks can as Saturday delivery to end

 

Expect empty mailboxes on Saturdays, beginning in August. To save money, the Postal Service will stop delivering mail on Saturdays, but packages will still be delivered.

The details

The Postal Service announced Wednesday that it planned to cut back to five-day-a-week deliveries for everything except packages.

What you need to know:

•  Saturday delivery of mail, such as letters and magazines that are going to street addresses, would end. Delivery would be only Monday through Friday.

•  Mail addressed to P.O. boxes still would be delivered on Saturday.

•  Post offices now open on Saturday would remain open on Saturday.

•  Delivery of packages of all sizes would remain the same, i.e., six days a week.

• The change would begin the week of Aug. 5.

•  Officials estimated that the cutback would save around $2 billion annually when it was fully in place.

ASSOCIATED PRESS


icordle@MiamiHerald.com

If you delight each Saturday in grabbing your magazine or movie from the mailbox, or just in seeing whatever the mail person brings — enjoy it while it lasts.

The financially struggling U.S. Postal Service said Wednesday it will stop delivering mail on Saturdays but continue to distribute packages six days a week, in an apparent end-run around an unaccommodating Congress.

The service expects the Saturday mail cutback to begin the week of Aug. 5 and to save about $2 billion annually, d Postmaster General and CEO Patrick R. Donahoe said.

“Our financial condition is urgent,” Donahoe said at a news conference in Washington, D.C.

The move accentuates one of the agency’s strong points — package delivery has increased by 14 percent since 2010, postal officials say, while the delivery of letters and other mail has declined with the increasing use of email and texting.

Yet for folks like Jeff Bray of Pembroke Pines, who looks forward to opening his mailbox each day, and feels most comfortable getting his bills in the mail and paying them with paper checks, the loss of Saturday delivery is a hard pill to swallow.

“We remember when we could get mail delivered twice a day, and now they are taking away our Saturdays,” said Bray, 65, a public relations executive in Hollywood. “It’s just a sad state of affairs.”

Under the new plan, mail would be delivered to homes and businesses Monday through Friday, but would still be delivered to post office boxes on Saturdays. Post offices now open on Saturdays would remain open on Saturdays.

Arnold Slotkin, a certified public accountant whose office is in Miami Beach, is worried the cutback will hurt his business.

“I would have no objection to it being Wednesday,” said Slotkin, 84, who lives in Hollywood. “Chop it out of the middle of the week, and that way there would be a day delay. But two days in a row is really disruptive.”

In Florida, 10,000 employees work at 188 post offices and processing plants from Fort Pierce to Key West, said South Florida spokeswoman Debbie Fetterly. No layoffs are planned at this time, she said.

Over the past several years, the Postal Service has advocated shifting to a five-day delivery schedule for mail and packages — and it repeatedly but unsuccessfully appealed to Congress to approve the move. Though an independent agency, the service gets no tax dollars for its day-to-day operations but is subject to congressional control.

Congress has included a ban on five-day delivery in its appropriations bill. But because the federal government is now operating under a temporary spending measure, rather than an appropriations bill, Donahoe says it’s the agency’s interpretation that it can make the change itself.

“This is not like a ‘gotcha’ or anything like that,” he said. The agency is essentially asking Congress not to reimpose the ban when the spending measure expires on March 27 and he said he would work with Congress on the issue.

The agency clearly thinks it has a majority of the American public on its side regarding the change.

Postal Service market research and other research indicated that nearly 7 in 10 Americans support the switch to five-day delivery as a way to reduce costs, the agency said.

“The Postal Service is advancing an important new approach to delivery that reflects the strong growth of our package business and responds to the financial realities resulting from America’s changing mailing habits,” Donahoe said. “We developed this approach by working with our customers to understand their delivery needs and by identifying creative ways to generate significant cost savings.”

Read more Nation stories from the Miami Herald

  • PART THREE: VIETNAM

    After decades of searching, could a handful of debris provide the answer?

    EDITOR’S NOTE: This is Part Three of a three-part series on the search for Spooky 21, an AC-47 gunship that disappeared with its six-man crew while on a secret mission over Laos during the Vietnam War. Reporter Matthew Schofield, who covers defense issues, spent months looking into the story behind the missing plane. He spoke with family members and military officials, and studied records and official histories, as well as traveling to Laos to see how searches were conducted. Part One is running on online and in print on Sunday, May 26, in Issues & Ideas. Part Two and Part Three are running online: http://www.miamiherald.com/issues/

  •  

Khusen Taramov, 22, shows a picture of FBI shooting victim, right, and himself, Wednesday, May 22, 2013 in front of his apartment in Kissimmee, Florida. His friend Ibragim Todashev, a 27-year-old mixed martial arts fighter, who was being questioned about his ties to one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, was shot to death by authorities early Wednesday after he lunged at an FBI agent with a knife, officials said. (Red Huber/Orlando Sentinel/MCT)

    Shooting in Orlando

    Murder suspect’s death and accusations against him shock Kissimmee neighbors

    Ibragim Todashev was killed by an FBI agent Tuesday. They say he turned violent after confessing to a triple murder in the Boston area and implicating one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.

  •  

During the execution of a search warrant, members of the Joint Federal Haz-Mat Team, FBI, and local law enforcement gather in front of the Osmun Apartments near the intersection of First Avenue and Oak Street in Browne's Addition on Saturday, May 18, 2013 in Spokane, Wash. The search warrant is in connection with ricin-laced letters intercepted at a Post Office facility in Spokane earlier in the week. (AP Photo/TheSpokesman-Review, Colin Mulvany) COEUR D'ALENE PRESS OUT

    Little known about suspect in Wash. ricin case

    A 37-year-old janitor who has been charged with threatening to kill a federal judge in a case that involves letters containing the deadly poison ricin is a registered sex offender who lived in a rundown apartment building near downtown Spokane.

Miami Herald

Join the
Discussion

The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere on the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

The Miami Herald uses Facebook's commenting system. You need to log in with a Facebook account in order to comment. If you have questions about commenting with your Facebook account, click here.

Have a news tip? You can send it anonymously. Click here to send us your tip - or - consider joining the Public Insight Network and become a source for The Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald.

Hide Comments

This affects comments on all stories.

Cancel OK

  • Videos

  • Quick Job Search

Enter Keyword(s) Enter City Select a State Select a Category