Postal Service

Snail mail may get even slower, starting this spring. The U.S. Postal Service said a plan to save $2.1 billion a year and fend off possible bankruptcy would effectively put an end to almost all overnight delivery of first-class letters and postcards. Delivery would take at least two to three business days. The postal service's decision to relax delivery standards for first-class mail follows its determination in September to close 252 mail processing plants, about half its total.

WASHINGTON -- The United States Postal Service stayed the sword hanging over thousands of rural post offices, opting instead to cut opening hours in a bid to stem devastating financial losses. The USPS estimates that the plan will save $500 million a year once it is fully implemented in 2014. A previous proposal to close down more than 3,000 rural post offices completely would have saved $200 million a year. Under the proposal outlined Wednesday, 13,167 post offices will open for between two and six hours a day. A spokeswoman for the USPS said no post offices will be forced to close, although communities could choose closure and switch to home delivery.

Lady Luck or Lady Liberty? Las Vegas edged out the Big Apple on a postage stamp that bears the likeness of Sin City's diminutive replica of the New York City landmark instead of the original. It wasn't intentional, U.S. Postal Service officials said, but there are no plans to correct the mistake. Though 2 billion of the stamps were issued Dec. 1 -- and 3 billion were printed -- the agency learned of the discrepancy only last month. "A stamp collector looked at the image and noticed that's not the original, that's the replica, the Las Vegas version," said Roy Betts, manager of community relations for the Postal Service in Washington.

The Senate passed a bill aimed at salvaging the United States Postal Service, which is hemorrhaging millions of dollars a day as fewer people send letters and conduct business by mail. The legislation would allow the postal service to reduce its pension and retiree benefit costs and pave the way for service changes. The bill passed by a vote of 62 to 37 Wednesday, after two days of voting on amendments. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), one of the bill's sponsors, said it would put the postal service back on course to financial health.

When Gene R. Howard got a job delivering mail for the post office more than three decades ago, it was supposed to be a temporary position to help pay college bills. But today--34 years later--the Ventura man is still an employee of the vast network that delivers the nation's mail. And he was recently named area vice president for the U.S. Postal Service's Pacific area, a gigantic postal region that includes all of California and Hawaii.

www.usps.com When you have a letter or a bill to mail, sometimes all you need is a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. But the familiar blue boxes are getting harder to find. The Postal Service has removed thousands of them nationwide in recent years to cut costs. The Postal Service website offers a search tool for locating mailboxes, but it's not easy to find, in part because the agency doesn't call them mailboxes. No, they're "collection boxes." From www.usps.com "> www.usps.

Part public agency, part privately funded business, the U.S. Postal Service doesn't fully operate like either one. And therein lies a central problem that threatens mail delivery more than rain, sleet or any other weather condition. No longer subsidized by the federal government, the Postal Service nevertheless is micromanaged by Congress, which regulates its prices and how many days a week it must make deliveries. At the same time, Postal Service managers come running to Congress for relief when their own bad decisions have landed the service in trouble.

Many Americans are upset by the U.S. Postal Service's request to discontinue Saturday deliveries. But unless we want taxpayers to finance its growing operating deficit, discontinuing Saturday delivery and other changes are necessary for the Postal Service to continue to meet its mandate to provide mail service. The Postal Service's business model is outdated. As technology, personal habits and preferences change, more and more communications and billing functions have moved online.

The U.S. Postal Service could hardly have come up with a worse solution to its financial problems than its proposal to slow first-class delivery to the point of irrelevance. Instead of delivering mail in a day or so, it would take two to three — at least. In other words, unless people who still pay bills by mail sent off their checks a week in advance, they wouldn't be guaranteed delivery by the due date. The new delivery times could prove lethal to the DVD-by-mail portion of Netflix operations, though that company has been managing to damage its business on its own. If more than a week is needed to receive a DVD and get it back to the video-rental company (this doesn't count viewing time)

The U.S. Postal Service is on the verge of financial collapse and should eliminate Saturday delivery, close thousands of local post offices, restructure its health plan and lay off 120,000 workers to survive, according to Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe. Donahoe asked lawmakers to allow him to make "radical" changes to the centuries-old institution so it could avoid defaulting on its obligations. At a Senate hearing Tuesday, he said the Postal Service was all but certain to miss a $5.5-billion payment to its retiree health fund due at the end of the month.

WASHINGTON -- It's legislative spring-cleaning time in Congress, where lawmakers are engaged in a busy week of should-pass legislation as both parties seek to tally accomplishments before taking a break to campaign during the upcoming recess. The Senate is closing in on passage of a long-debated overhaul to the Postal Service that would save Saturday delivery and make it more difficult for the government to close rural post offices. The postal bill still faces dozens of possible amendments, including one from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)

The U.S. Postal Service faces serious trouble in the email age -- no one disputes that. But is the answer really more junk mail? "We believe it could be a billion-dollar product for the Postal Service by 2016," says Paul Vogel, president and chief marketing officer for the Postal Service. The agency posted a loss of $5.1 billion for the year ended Sept. 30 as the volume of first-class mail continued to plunge and as it covered healthcare benefits for retirees. To help stem the tide of red ink, the Postal Service is looking to close more than 200 facilities and cut about 32,000 jobs.

Postal Service heroes Re "Recalling first-class kindness," Opinion, Dec. 21 Ben Kamin's article about the U.S. Postal Service brought back pleasant memories. In the 1950s my future husband was in Air Force basic training in San Antonio. I would wait for our postman "Mac" every day; most days I was rewarded with a letter. One day as he walked by our house he called out "Nope, not today. " He was two houses down before he came back with my letter. He thought it was the funniest practical joke.

Holiday shipments are up this year as delivery outfits including UPS, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service scramble to get packages and cards delivered during their busiest week of the year. Thursday was the busiest day of 2011 for the brown-suited elves at United Parcel Service Inc., who delivered nearly 26 million items. That's roughly 300 deliveries a second, up 60% from the parcel shipping company's normal daily average. The company will handle an estimated 120 million shipments during the week before Christmas, up from the 113 million sent this time last year.

Choices on the menu Re "School menu fails student test," Dec. 18 The failure of the new school lunch menus again proves that no matter how much the do-gooders in government wish it were different, they can't and shouldn't try to dictate taste and behavior. Whether it is the food we eat, the light bulbs we use, the mileage of the car we buy, the decision to gamble on the Internet or with whom we choose to be intimate — stay out of our lives. John Piccininni Newport Beach I read this article with skepticism.

The U.S. Postal Service announced plans this month to phase out overnight delivery of first-class mail. Postal officials are portraying the decision as a painful but necessary budget-induced departure from a long history of exemplary service. In reality, the Postal Service has been intentionally slowing down first-class mail for almost 50 years. It's time to end the post office's monopoly on letter delivery. In 1960, the post office's annual report announced "the ultimate objective of next-day delivery of first-class mail anywhere in the United States.

The U.S. Postal Service could hardly have come up with a worse solution to its financial problems than its proposal to slow first-class delivery to the point of irrelevance. Instead of delivering mail in a day or so, it would take two to three — at least. In other words, unless people who still pay bills by mail sent off their checks a week in advance, they wouldn't be guaranteed delivery by the due date. The new delivery times could prove lethal to the DVD-by-mail portion of Netflix operations, though that company has been managing to damage its business on its own. If more than a week is needed to receive a DVD and get it back to the video-rental company (this doesn't count viewing time)