14-Mar-10 12:00 PM EST

Rain nor sleet nor snow (except Saturday); Postal Service looks at dropping weekend service

Rain nor sleet nor snow (except Saturday); Postal Service looks at dropping weekend service
Chris Bjorke
Bismark Tribune

If the U.S. Postal Service were a business plan, it would be audacious, if not unworkable: Maintain a network of offices in the smallest, most isolated towns and the biggest metro areas, and deliver items right to anyone’s door, six days a week.

Or maybe five.

Because of the Postal Service’s reach and mandate to serve customers for the small price of a stamp, compounded by the prevalence of online communication, the government service needs a lot more money. The service is considering a number of cost-saving ideas to make up a $7 billion budget shortfall, and it recently floated the idea of ending Saturday delivery.

“Something has to happen. We have seen a serious decrease in mail volume,” said Pete Nowacki, a postal service spokesman based in the Minneapolis area.

While the number of addresses that the Postal Service delivers to keeps increasing with the population, the number of pieces of mail — along with the number of stamps purchased and shipments paid for — goes down every year. Deliveries peaked in 2006 at 213 billion pieces of mail and are projected to total 150 billion by 2020, Nowacki said.

The most obvious reason for the drop in mail delivery is the Internet. When information can be sent instantaneously, it makes less sense for it to be printed on paper, driven to its destination and hand-delivered to its recipient.

But for some, physical mail will still be the standard for the time being.

“We have over 65 customers and we’re processing 125,000 transactions a month,” said Jackie Zachmeier, who is in charge of the utility bill payment program for the National Information Solutions Cooperative in Mandan. Her department processes $3 billion worth of payments to utilities and services for Fortune 100 corporations at locations across the country. And most of those bills still come to NISC in envelopes.

“Our biggest mail day for our department already is Monday,” Zachmeier said. She heard from the Mandan post office that mail could still be picked up Saturdays if delivery were ended, but she has been following the Postal Service’s decisions closely.

NISC has employees who process mail on Saturdays, and the loss of Saturday delivery means rearranging staff to deal with the same workload concentrated into fewer days. “We’re in jeopardy of losing that sixth working day.”

But not everyone gets as much mail as NISC.

Randy Hellman, owner of Hellman Brothers Men’s Clothing in Bismarck, has a business that involves a high degree of customer attention. As a tailor, he works on clothes to suit customers and relies on the post office to deliver their suits.

“Within the state, we use the Postal Service to deliver to customers because it’s a little faster,” he said. “The other great thing is that they deliver on Saturdays.”

Hellman said he would miss not being able to make deliveries on Saturdays and his customers would lose out as well.

Nowacki cited a Gallup Poll showing that two thirds of mail customers would rather lose Saturday delivery than see postage rates go up, which would likely drive down mail volume even more. Not that people need more encouragement to abandon the Postal Service for electronic delivery. The tax deadline is approaching and more filers are likely to send their returns online.

“Each one of those is a stamp that isn’t purchased,” Nowacki said.

The USPS’s budget comes from what it makes in revenue and its budget gap has to be made up through cost savings or rate increases. According to Nowacki, dropping Saturday mail would save the service $3 billion.

Business owner Dave Renner is doing his part to feed the Postal Service’s revenue.

“I spent 13 grand last year at the post office,” said Renner, who owns Collectors Universe in Bismarck and does about 40 percent of his business by mail, buying and selling memorabilia and other items over the Internet. He said he would not miss Saturday deliveries.

“The only thing coming anyway is bills, so who cares?” he said.

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