President Obama has issued his plan for getting the United States Postal Service back into the black, no pun intended. Here is a Reuters article from Yahoo News about that plan.
The President proposes stopping Saturday delivery and allowing the USPS to sell non-postal items. I fear the administration's plan only does the minimum necessary to stave off imminent disaster.
What should be done, call it the COTTonLINE plan, is to move all non-P.O.Box mail delivery to three times a week, and not do away with Saturday delivery. Half of mail recipients would get mail Monday-Wednesday-Friday and the other half would get mail Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday.
Here is my reasoning: (a) the amount of mail being delivered per day is down because of the Internet so (b) mail carriers are carrying less mail to each house each day. (c) Reduce delivery to every other day and the amount delivered on any given day goes back up. (d) I get very little mail the delivery of which a day later would matter greatly.
This plan would enable the USPS to reduce the number of trucks it buys, fuels and repairs, and the number of carriers it hires, trains, insures and later retires. The reduction would not be 50%, but it would be quite substantial.
