Saturday Mail Delivery to End, Postal Service Announces

Calling the six-days-per-week mail delivery business model “no longer sustainable,” the U.S. Postal Service announced Wednesday it will eliminate Saturday delivery of mail by Aug. 1.

The plan to change delivery from six days a week to five would only affect first-class mail. Packages, mail-order medicines, priority and express mail would still be delivered on Saturdays, and local post offices will remain open for business Saturdays.

"It's just going to mean more mail on Monday," Wania Unti, a Patterson resident, told Patch as she left the post office in Southeast Wednesday afternoon. "More junk mail."

Unti said the change would not affect her, and that she and her husband do most of their billing online. She uses the Postal Service most around the holidays. Her in-person visits are infrequent—once a month or less, depending on if she's sending a package to her kid at college.

Other local folks weighed in on the news via Southeast-Brewster Patch's Facebook page. One user said the Postal Service should be shut down completely; another expressed disappointment because of how the change would impact deliveries of DVDs via Netflix, a company that streams television shows, rents movies and more.

According to the U.S. Postal Service, the reasons are continued economic struggles and the increasing use of the Internet for communications and bill paying by consumers. The U.S. Postal Service is also the only federal agency required to pre-fund health benefits for retirees, and those costs are escalating quickly.

“Our current business model of delivering mail six days a week is no longer sustainable. We must change in order to remain an integral part of the American community for decades to come.”

Saturday is the lightest mail delivery day by volume and many businesses are closed on Saturdays, according to the U.S. Postal Service. However, many residents receive print magazines and ads on Saturdays in the mail that may be shifted to another day.

A Rasmussen poll on mail delivery in 2012 showed “Three-out-of-four Americans (75 percent) would prefer the U.S. Postal Service cut mail delivery to five days a week rather than receive government subsidies to cover ongoing losses.”

A USA Today/Gallup poll in 2010 found the majority of U.S. residents surveyed were ok with eliminating Saturday delivery. The March 2010 telephone survey of 999 adults revealed people age 55 and older were more likely than younger people to have used the mail to pay a bill or send a letter in the past two weeks.

Speak out: How will this change affect you? Will you miss getting mail on Saturdays?