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1 Michael Schuyler, Saturday Mail Delivery Soon a Distant Memory 1 (2013)

handle is hein.taxfoundation/ffdgaxz0001 and id is 1 raw text is: February 13, 2013 No. 360 Saturday Mail Delivery Soon a Distant Memory? By Michael Schuyler, PhD Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe surprised the nation last week when he announced that the U.S. Postal Service would move to five-day-a-week letter delivery starting in August.1 The Postmaster General also promised several accommodations to ease the inconvenience for mail users: post offices now open on Saturdays will remain open on Saturdays; post office box service will continue on Saturdays; Express Mail deliveries will not be delayed; and packages will still be delivered on Saturdays. Further, USPS is giving its customers six months' notice to help them prepare for the change. The proposed change will occur in August, when mail volume is traditionally low and glitches are easier to remedy than during the peak mailing season. Reductions in service are never popular, but eliminating Saturday delivery has consistently aroused less public opposition than other proposals for achieving comparably large savings. In public opinion surveys, two-thirds or more of respondents regularly say they would be willing to end Saturday delivery to avoid a price hike, and in a Rasmussen survey last year, 75 percent opposed retaining Saturday delivery if it would require government subsidies.2 Of course, now that the Postal Service has stated its firm intention to make the switch and announced a specific timetable, it will be interesting to see if public opinion remains supportive. The Service's action follows an unprecedented and continuing plunge in mail demand that began in 2007, multibillion dollar losses in every year over the period, two defaults to the U.S. Treasury totaling $11.1 billion in 2012, a reduction in the Postal Service's cash-reserve cushion to only a few days' expenses, and the maxing out of its $15 billion government credit line. The falloff in mail demand is due to accelerating Internet penetration--a trend that will not reverse--and to the Great Recession and the subsequent anemic recovery. From 2006 to 2012, total mail volume fell 25 1 For the Postal Service's press release, see U.S. Postal Service, Postal Service Announces New Delivery Schedule, Feb. 6, 2013, 2 Rasmussen Reports, Most Prefer Cutting Mail Delivery to More Subsidies for the Postal Service, Apr. 24, 2012,

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