Closing down one of the post offices in South Dakota, specifically the Reva, South Dakota post office, would save the US Postal Service $8,000 per year. Peanuts. This tells me that the US Postal Service is a) penny-wise, pound-foolish; and, b) their financial problems have nothing to do with serving rural communities.
I used to think it was too expensive for the US Postal Service to serve rural communities but when I see that shutting down the Reva, North Dakota, post office would save all of $8,000 per year, one has to wonder.
The U.S. Postal Service says it will save around $8,000 per year over the next decade by closing the post office in Reva, a rural Harding County community.
Residents of Reva, which has four residents in the unincorporated town and around 100 people living in the surrounding ranchland, fiercely oppose the proposal, saying it jeopardizes their community’s future.
But USPS says it will save almost $80,000 over the next decade if it closes the Reva post office and assigns services there to Lemmon, 74 miles away.As noted in my earlier note on this subject, the financial problems have to do with financial mismanagement and not due to serving rural communities. Even the New York Times got that right:
According to the New York Times: decades of contractual promises made to unionized workers, including no-layoff clauses, are increasing the post office’s costs. Labor represents 80 percent of the agency’s expenses, compared with 53 percent at United Parcel Service and 32 percent at FedEx, its two biggest private competitors. Postal workers also receive more generous health benefits than most other federal employees.After posting that yesterday, I received some "hate mail," but "anonymous" was unable to show where the New York Times was wrong.
My hunch is that folks can come up with any number of ways for the US Postal Service to keep the Reva post office open without detriment to the overall financial condition for the US Postal Service.
