Do you still use the U.S. Mail? Well if so, get ready to send those Christmas and birthday cards much earlier, since it will now take longer for them to arrive.
The U.S. Postal Service is in dire straits, since most of us now use the Internet for everything from sending birthday greetings to bill payments. So the agency is being forced to make drastic cuts for their very survival, which will see the closure of about 250 of the nearly 500 mail processing centers throughout the country as early as March of 2012. The consolidation of processing centers will lengthen the distance mail travels from post office to processing center, which means there will now be lower delivery standards for first-class mail for the first time since 1971.
Currently, first-class mail is delivered to homes and businesses within the continental U.S. in about 1 to 3 days. But the new changes will lengthen that to around 2 to 3 days, effectively ending the expectation of next-day delivery in surrounding communities. Magazines and other periodicals could take as much as 2 to 9 days.
About 42% of first-class mail is now delivered the following day. Nearly 27% arrives in 2 days, 31% in 3 days and less than 1% in 4 to 5 days. By next spring, about 51% of all first-class mail will arrive in 2 days, with most of the remainder delivered in 3 days.
“It’s a potentially major change, but I don’t think consumers are focused on it and it won’t register until the service goes away,” said S&P Capital IQ analyst Jim Corridore, who tracks the shipping industry. “Over time, to the extent the customer service experience gets worse, it will only increase the shift away from mail to alternatives. There’s almost nothing you can’t do online that you can do by mail.”
In addition to the consolidation of mail processing centers, the USPS is also planning to close about 3,700 local post offices across the country. In all, roughly 100,000 postal employees could be cut as a result of the various closures. For the USPS, this will result in a savings of up to $6.5 billion a year, but for those 100,000 displaced workers, it will create a hefty dent in deeper U.S. unemployment numbers.
