The finances can´t be fixed because of te over the top pension plans which they´re dancing around.

Their solution on saturady deliveries shows why they´re so damn incompetent and in the red.

They´ll continue Saturday deliveries in some circumstances like prescriptions.So what are they going to do,sort through mail looking for drug stores? Are you going to call in a delivery person if there´s only one prescription to be delivered? It´ll cost more money to figure out who gets a delivery than just keeping Saturdays running.

This is all a bluff for a bailout anyway and they´ll get one before August.

Last week they had a story about a black woman standing to lose her job and life is she gets laid off. This storyline will be a prop for a bailout.Blacks hardest hit by postal layoffs.

I can´t believe congress hasn´t found a way to get their hands on that pre-funded pension money. You know, for more windmills and such.

Yawn... No Saturday deliveries? No problem.

Cannot get your pills via mail on Saturday? Order them a day earlier.

This is not complicated.

I think that mail should be delivered once per week . For me, the best day would be Friday since that is the day our garbage is picked up. That way , I could ask the mailman to just put the mail right in the garbage can - saving me six days of having to do it myself.

Gee, #3, my wife ordered a prescription back on January 10th. It is now February 7th, and last we heard the pills were languishing in Springfield, Ma, and we are in Florida. Just how early are we supposed to order with this postal "service"?
The post office is the poorest excuse for a business, and any civilian business would have been gone years ago. It´s long past time to privatize them, and let the private sector run it right. Then maybe my wife could get her meds.

Congress or Obama will not allow this to happen. Watch them step in. The USPS should be privatized and where feasible any other government agency or service.

Tricare is now offering mail ordered meds. No thanks. I´ll just pick them up instead of going through problems waiting for the mailman to deliver it to me.

Isn´t Congress now in charge of our healthcare system, too?

Is Salon trying to say that Big Government is the problem?

The mail service began to go bad (in our experience) back in the sixties, at least in larger cities, not just since Congress made it a quango (quasi-independent government organization) in the seventies. After experiencing mail service in eight states over the years we´ve moved mostly to e-mail. To be honest, had mail service been better I don´t think we would have moved to e-mail for personal mail (or UPS or FedEx or in-store delivery).

And I did think the former Royal Mail (now Post Office) was much better than USPS. That may have changed in the last decade but service was above and beyond before that. It certainly didn´t take three days (or more) to send a letter across town. In fact, when the UK Post Office had twice-daily deliveries (until 2004), a letter could be received the very same day it was mailed! Union-organized strikes helped to change things--one lasting two months.

As for the USPS, I´m afraid I won´t miss it if it goes completely. I refuse to go to the post offices near us because of their surly and inefficient service. (Funny how they´ve never lost a delivery of postage stamps by USPS.) I might try the new system of postal service desks in some retail establishments--but will never go back to sending personal mail by USPS and will continue to use a more reliable bank transfer instead of checks by mail.

This example (the postal service) is a succinct illustration of why just about anything run by govt. is doomed to high costs and inefficiency.

Any federal program, and many state run programs that run on "federal" money, are subject to meddling from any member of congress, the POTUS, and any number of cabinet members. Remember the old cliche about too many chefs.

So why any nitwit could argue that we´ll be better off with our entire health care system being run in a similar manner is beyond my paltry abilities to understand.

The USPS has been very good in my experience. Parcels are delivered as quickly as UPS or Fedex. First-class mail arrives at its destination within three days on average, oftentimes sooner.
We live in a rural area and get our newspaper by mail except on Sun. Losing Sat. delivery would be a pain. But what´s worse is that there would be all those 3-day week-ends with no delivery or pick-up. If they have to pick an extra non-delivery day, mid-week would be better.
By ignoring the 800 pound gorilla which is the pension funding, the USPS problem will never be solved.
Gov. is the only entity that believes that worse and more expensive service will generate more business.
To those who say it doesn´t affect them, I say: one day it will be your ox getting gored and there won´t be anyone there to defend you.

Yes, they are deliverig more packages because the carriers that Amazon uses hands their packages off to the post office nearest your home.

Just about all of our Amazon purchases are delivered by UPS or Fed Ex to our local post office.

Does anyone else remember that the post office used to deliver day-old baby chickens back in the ’40’s?

Minimum order 25…shipped in boxes sized to hold 100 in four compartments. Ordered from Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs!

How far they have fallen!!

Right now the main problem that the USPS has is that Congress mandated that they fund their pension plan at something like three times the level of that required of any private company with similar plans.

USPS - Union! That is the reason for it´s decline, plain and simple!

Unions, and affirmative action taken to ridiculous extremes, are what destroyed the USPS.

Just a few decades ago, the USPS was an efficient organization that did it´s job -- it delivered mail. It did so cheaply, efficiently, and still managed to make profits. Like most companies back then, you saw mostly clean cut, hard working, white males working there back then.

Then the unions went insane, and started hiring only incompetent and unqualified individuals based solely on their gender and race. They now lose billions of dollars every year, and we all have horror stories of bad service, rude and incompetent employees, lost or damaged mail, and prices that seem to go up every few months these days. Coincedently, I honestly can´t remember the last time I saw a white male in a USPS uniform. I guess they are all working for FEDEX or UPS now.

Don´t get me wrong. For the two or three times a year that I actually still mail something, it´s not a bad deal. $0.46 to mail a letter across the country isn´t bad. I have a reasonable confidence that it will get there most of the time within a few days.

But the hypocrisy of the USPS is what cost them most of my business. A few years ago, the USPS decided to call those stamps with the pictures of Mary and the baby Jesus that they come out with every fall as “Holiday” stamps.

Of course the Hanukah stamp was still called the Hanukah stamp, and the Eid al-Fatr stamp was still called the Eid al-Fatr stamp. But I guess the word “Christmas” was just too “offensive” for them to take that chance.

At that point, I wrote the USPS to ask why, and they didn’t give me so much as a courtesy reply. So we stopped mailing Christmas cards. We just hand-deliver them today.

We have six day of delivery now, let´s keep six days, but on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday deliver to my house and Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday deliver to your house and cut the number of employes in half.

The article is inaccurate as it pertains to funding future health care costs. There is accounting treatment determined on an actuarial basis. This is different from the actual funding, also done on an actuarial basis. The funding is based on the life expectancy of actual current employees. Post office wants to pay based on actual out of pocket expenditures.

This ain´t Social Security. The article is postal union propaganda.

All that aside, it is essential that we have a reliable national postal system. Everything cannot be sent electronically.

Don´t remember the chicks from the catalogs, but the radio always advertised your chicks from Del Rio, Texas.

Postal service is, after all, a constitutionally mandated responsibility of the Federal Government.