Editorial: Canceling Saturday mail delivery is necessary

By Daily Forty-Niner Editorial Board

Saturdays may have become a whole lot grimmer with the U.S. Postal Service’s calling an end to its Saturday deliveries.

The U.S. Postal Service wishes to move to a five-day-mail-delivery schedule to cut nearly $2 billion in losses. The end to the Saturday service is proposed for August.

Packages would still be delivered six days a week, but letters, bills and junk mail that we receive on the weekend will be pushed back to the following week.

The slimming down of the U.S. Postal Service has been inevitable for quite sometime. With the rise of the Internet, email and smartphones, sending messages through the mail has become the slowest form of communication and the most expensive. That is even with stamps costing 46 cents each.

The U.S. Postal Service is funded by the government. The government, with trillions of dollars of debt, needs to make cuts somewhere. The Saturday U.S. Postal Service could be one of those cuts.

The editorial board for the Daily 49er agrees that it is a necessary evil to cut Saturday delivery.

We all occasionally use the U.S. Postal Service to mail letters to family or friends, receive the arts and crafts we buy on Etsy or pay our bills. However, eliminating Saturday service will not have a great effect on our lives. We will just have to plan accordingly so we can make sure our mail arrives on time.

The fact of the matter is that by closing the Saturday mail delivery, the U.S. Postal Service saves a lot of money. By cutting Saturday service, this hopefully means the U.S. Postal Service will not have to cut as many jobs. Yes, there will be one less day available for mailmen and mailwomen to work, but at least more will be able to keep their routes during the week.

As for the rest of us, we will have to resort to emailing each other on Saturdays — but that’s not too much of a stretch. We email each other on a daily basis as it is.

It is interesting, though, to wonder if canceling the Saturday service could start a trend.

Technology is gradually changing the way we live our lives.

There could be a time when the U.S. Postal Service delivery is entirely canceled. As the mail system becomes more and more irrelevant, this is not a far-off possibility. This could become a reality as we find better and more efficient means of communicating with each other.

Read more here: http://www.daily49er.com/opinion/our-view-canceling-saturday-mail-delivery-is-necessary-1.2809266#.URhUbGck4Vc
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