The US Post Office is looking to close 3,700 post offices nationwide. This sounds "bad" on the surface, but the "post office" actually has a pretty clever solution to keep these offices open. I hope it works out. I think it's a very clever idea.
Going through this story one finds a number of interesting data points. This might be the most interesting:
In California, one of the largest states in both geographical area and population, "more than 100" sites are on the list.The post office in Parshall has recently closed.
North Dakota, one of the smallest states in population, there are 76 sites on the list (if I counted correctly). There are 80 offices on the South Dakota list.
This is the number I would like to see: savings from closing these 3,700 post offices nationwide, and the savings generated by going to five-day delivery service. And not yet, but eventually three-day delivery service. (That wouldn't mean that postal delivery personnel would not have 40-hour work weeks; they would have multiple routes to get them to 40-hour weeks. [Update: closings would result in an annual savings of $200 million. The post office will lose $8,000 million this year. The closures represent a drop in the bucket.]
Like most companies, a huge expense is not the annual salary for all these employees, but the pensions and the health care premiums.
One of the post offices not on the list is the one in Belmont, Massachusetts, just down the street from where I am currently residing. This post office does not provide any outgoing mail: no mailboxes, no general delivery, no package pick-up, nothing. It is used only for outgoing mail. This function could easily be picked up by the UPS store just a few blocks away. This particular Belmont office has one or two employees serving the public; I do not know if there are additional employees in the back, or if there are services provided I am not aware of that necessitates that this office stay open.
