Postal Cost Cuts To Slow First Class Delivery

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 5, 6:47AM EST

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The age in which first class letters could be delivered in one day is over. The US Postal Services, facing huge deficits and a multi-billion pension liability, will save costs by setting first class delivery times of two to five days.

The USPS has already proposed to Congress that it lay off tens of thousands of employees and close hundreds of Post Offices. So, far Congress has failed to act on the cost cuts suggested by the Postmaster General. It is widely assumed that without sharp cuts, the Post Office will file for bankruptcy.

Americans may not care about the end of next-day first class mail. So much of the information, written and data, transferred in the US is via email and broadband delivered files. Overnight letters and packages are often delievered by overnight services–particularly UPS (NYSE: UPS) and Fedex (NYSE: FDX).

First class mail may not be the only service eliminated by the USPS. There is also discussion that Saturday mail will be cut

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.