The United States Postal Service said it planned to largely eliminate next-day delivery for first-class mail as part of its push to cut costs and reduce its budget deficit. Currently, more than 40 percent of first-class mail is delivered in one day.
The agency said the slower delivery would result from its decision to shut about half of its 487 mail processing centers nationwide. The move is expected to eliminate about 28,000 jobs and increase the distance that mail must travel between post offices and processing centers. It would be the first reduction in delivery standards for first-class mail in 40 years.
Current standards call for delivering first-class mail in one to three days within the continental United States. Under the planned cutbacks, those delivery times would increase to two or three days, potentially creating problems for clients of Netflix, the popular DVD-by-mail service, who hope that their next episodes of “Mad Men” will arrive in a day, or procrastinators who like to pay bills as late as possible.
The agency had announced on Sept. 15 that it would begin studying plans to close 252 of its mail processing centers.
On Monday, the Postal Service said it would “move forward” with that plan, with closings to begin as early as March. It also said it was seeking a nonbinding advisory opinion from the Postal Regulatory Commission about the closures, although agency officials said they were intent on closing the processing centers as part of a plan to save $3 billion a year by 2015.
“The bottom line is that in the last three years, we’ve lost almost 27 percent of our first-class volume,” Patrick Donahoe, the postmaster general, said in a phone interview. “In 2000, 5 percent of people paid bills online. Now it’s 60 percent. The problem is we’ve lost so much volume in blue-box mail, we can’t hold out for next-day service anymore.”
The Postal Service lost $5.1 billion last year.
Mr. Donahoe has said that by 2015, he hopes to cut $20 billion from the agency’s annual costs, now about $75 billion. He has called for closing up to 3,700 of the nation’s 32,000 post offices, reducing deliveries to five days a week from six and cutting the agency’s work force of 653,000 employees by more than 100,000.
Postal officials said they would not make definitive announcements on any post office closings before January.
But many of the other proposed changes sought by the agency would require Congressional action.
So far, lawmakers have been unwilling to grant Mr. Donahoe’s requests or agree on an alternative plan of action.
“What I need Congress to do is act now to help me on the things they can help me on,” Mr. Donahoe said.
In particular, he urged Congress to approve five-day-a-week delivery and to remove the post office’s obligation to set aside about $5.5 billion a year for 10 years to prefund retiree health care, a burden that has accounted for a large share of the agency’s financial losses in recent years. If Congress takes those two actions, “it can help me save $8.5 billion a year,” he said.
The Postal Service had previously announced a 1-cent increase in first-class postage, to 45 cents, starting Jan. 22.
Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, voiced concern about the proposal to reduce delivery standards.
“High-quality service is essential to preserving the value of our networks and to any future growth strategy,” Mr. Rolando said in a statement. “Degrading standards not only hurts the public and the businesses we serve, it’s also counterproductive for the Postal Service because it will drive more people away from using the mail.”
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2b05b39eeecafd1a428a66913541d928
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