Mail delivery in Santa Fe is already a source of anxiety for residents. We've had people call us to say they were misdelivered our mail and they aren't even in the same zip code. Today, we were misdelivered a letter to someone who shares the same house number...but not the same road. This is a common and almost accepted problem here. Well, the latest news from Washington won't help.
Asking lawmakers to lift the requirement that the United States Postal Service deliver mail six days a week, the postmaster general told Congress on Wednesday that massive deficits could--read this as "are likely to"--force USPS to cut out one day of mail delivery. And it won't necessarily be Saturday that is cut: studies have examined skipping some other day when mail flow is light. Such as Tuesday. "We will gladly delay past Tuesday your mail from today."
The post office was $2.8 billion in the red last year. USPS may experience a net loss of $6 billion fiscal year, according to testimony January 28 by the postmaster general for a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee. Total mail volume was 202 billion items last year--9 billion less than the year before, the largest single volume drop in history. And, despite annual rate increases, 2009 could be the first year since 1946 that the actual amount of money collected by the post office declines.
