USPS to Just Go Ahead And Start Closing Stuff
The United States Postal Service would very much like Congress to help it save some money, but since that's not happening, it said on Thursday it would just go ahead and start closing stuff, starting with 140 mail processing centers in the next year.
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According to a USPS statement, 48 sites will shutter starting in August, with most of the rest closing in the early months of next year. Then there's this: "These consolidating activities will reduce the size of the Postal Service workforce by approximately 13,000 employees and, when fully implemented, will generate cost reductions of approximately $1.2 billion annually."
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This is just the latest bad USPS news, Last week it announced it had lost $3.2 billion in the second quarter of the fiscal year, compared to $2.2 billion lost the same period a year earlier. Declining First Class and Standard Mail volumes contributed to the loss, USPS said, but: "The losses are due primarily to legislative mandates such as the unique mandated pre-funding of retiree health benefits, and prohibiting management from making the needed operational and human resource changes required to address these issues under current laws and contracts." It has pledged not to close rural post offices, but the postal service says it's got to cut costs somewhere, so it's going to go ahead and start closures. A full list of the closures can be found at the USPS website.
