There has been a lot said lately about the losses piling up at the Post Office. Charges and counter-charges are flying back and forth from the varying factions with the Postmaster requesting a waiver on the $5 Billion due for employee retirements to the postal worker’s union blaming congress for the huge losses.  I have often said that I can prove both sides of an argument using the same numbers and the ongoing divergent arguments on this issue prove the point.  The key is that you do not use all of the numbers in the opposing arguments.

We could spend an enormous amount of time arguing which set of numbers is right but there is no doubt that mail volume has declined and that the Post Office is losing money. Having said that, there is one move that could have a substantial impact on economics at the Post Office – the elimination of daily residential mail delivery.  Why do we need six-day a week residential delivery? Why would residential mail being delivered two or three times a week not be sufficient?  I have four years experience with once a week delivery of our mail for five months each year.  During our summer stay in Minnesota we utilize Premium Forwarding Service from the U S Post Office.  This is a fee based service where our mail is accumulated in Arizona from Thursday through the following Wednesday and sent on to Minnesota in a Priority Mail Package.  That’s right – we exist very well with once a week delivery of our mail.  The only downside to this as opposed to regular forwarding is that we still get all of the junk mail.  The positive is that our periodicals are forwarded for more than 60 days.

I do not know the exact level of the impact of moving from six-day residential delivery to two or three-day delivery would have but it is hard to argue that it would not be substantial. Mail delivery is a labor intensive operation – every time you perform the service it requires the same level of labor input – so reducing the frequency from six times per week to two or three times per week should, and hopefully would, have a commensurate reduction in the overall cost of delivering residential mail.

Would there be any negative impacts?  Probably, with the reduction in the number of people required to provide the service there would be an impact on those no longer required but that has played out in other industries over the years as productivity has improved.  Given history it is hard to argue that we will not see a continuing decline in the volume of First Class Mail, so the longer we delay dealing with the issue the greater the losses.  Obviously this is not the only solution but it is one that would have little or no impact on the general public.