What do you think of the proposed USPS closures?

I hope they don’t kill ours. It’s too far to go to the city. People will have to drive much more than they need to which will amount to a hidden tax on people.

I am worried about unemployment.

I mourn the decline of snail mail. It had a physical impact that email does not have.

I think it stinks. But hey, if you don’t evolve, you die. FedX and UPS have mutated into more than just delivery services, being associated with copy print shops and offering full packaging service. They also don’t have to endure the bi-yearly bad publicity campaign of “Hey guess what? We’re raising our stamp prices, AGAIN”.

They could easily evolve into something much more than the current long line that they are. Where is the entrepreneurial spirit within the US Post Office? Maybe if China buys them they’ll turn into something profitable.

I’m not totally convinced the USPS was ever supposed to turn a profit.To break even would be alright though.

@woodcutter It sounds like you’re in a rather remote area. What concerns me about closing those small POs and replacing them with grocery store counters is that it will be like the already existing packing/shipping stores with a steep markup on postal services. That seems like it could be a hardship for older people who rely more on USPS and are on a fixed income.

I’m sure it will be privatized so it will probably exist in the future. If you look into it further, there are plenty of ideas out there to fix it but the govt reacted too late. So someone taking it over could turn it around. Question could be, we pay for USPS by way of taxes and stamps. If it goes under, the billions we pay for it, think our taxes will go down too?

I for one will miss it even though I seldom use it.

I think that’s a lot of people without a local physical PO and a lot of lost jobs. I use the postal service a lot. I like paper files and paper bill and writing a check and mailing it to pay those bills.

I can hear the business community griping about this if they have to only use Fed Ex. It will drive up the cost of doing business. When they pay more, we pay more.

The post office may not have an advantage over email when it comes to speed and the power to transport information, but if you receive a letter from someone you miss, handwritten messages are always more emotional than emails (and 140 char. twitter messages by a longshot). The ability to get an actual physical letter from someone makes them feel closer to home than an email that doesn’t really exist phyically.

I like that word dinosaur

When I retire, we will live in a very small community of only 2500. I worry they will close that post office, and cause us to drive 25 miles to the nearest big city.

Well, if USPS is going to be expected to turn a profit, then these kind of cuts have to be made. On the other hand, I don’t think people should have to drive 25 miles to get to a post office. Maybe the gov’t should subsidize certain locations.

Here’s the deal. You can send a letter form California to Maine for about .50? That probably has a bit to do with a lot of their problems.

@gabby94805 That’s what the proposed “Village Post Office” is supposed to do. The govt will contract with local store owners and pay them to operate a limited Postal counter within their stores.