Good Question

Good Question: Why Not Stop Saturday Mail?

(WCCO) With the U.S. Postal Service reporting a second quarter net loss of $707 million, and first class stamps about to rise to 42 cents, cost cutting is on the mind of the executives, and of WCCO-TV viewers.

"The cost of postage keeps going up. What does it cost to have our mail carriers deliver mail on Saturdays? We should eliminate Saturday delivery to keep costs down," e-mailed Wendy Eilers, a Maple Grove, Minn. resident.

Indeed, the Postal Service reports a more than 3 percent drop in mail sent during the second quarter of 2008. Over the years, they've seen people sending more e-mail and paying more bills on-line. Now in an economic downturn, they're seeing major business customers cutting down on their direct mailings.

Cutting down on Saturday mail service is something that has been proposed in the past, so why not do that today, wondered Eilers.

"That's a great question, it's a really great question," said Cynthia Larson, Postmaster for Minneapolis.

"We are mandated through congress to provide universal service to our customers six days a week," she said.

That means that by law, the Postal Service has to deliver mail to every address in the country, at the same charge every day, for six days a week.

According to Larson, whenever the idea comes up to cut back service to five days, "something else comes up and this gets put aside. The public really wants mail on Saturday," she said.

There are other concerns, largely logistical. The Postal Service handled more than 51 billion pieces of mail in the second quarter, and the entire distribution system has been designed to distribute that load over six days.

"It would make it very difficult. Right now, our Monday's volume is usually our heaviest volume day, so if we didn't have Saturday delivery, then it would be Monday and Tuesday that would be extremely heavy," said Larson.

It's possible it would take a letter carrier 12 hours to finish a Monday route with six days of work being crunched into five.

Also, many direct mailers prefer to have their promotional mailings delivered on Saturday, because it's likely that consumers are at home, and available to immediately open the letter.

"They target market now. So they know most the people are home on Saturdays, so they want to make sure they get the mail piece on Friday or Saturday so they can take it shopping with them. We call it the 'mail moment.' That is the advertising moment that we have that nobody else has," she added.

High gasoline prices are a major cost problem for the Postal Service. According to Larson, each time gas prices rise one penny; it costs the Postal Service an extra $15 million across the fleet. So grounding the delivery trucks would certainly provide a savings.

"I believe eventually there would be [a cost savings], but we would have to redo thinfrastructure," she said.

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