America’s Town Post Office and Its Workforce

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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America’s Town Post Office and Its Workforce

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There are over 34,000 post offices in America. Some are in towns with fewer than 5,000 people. One such post office in a Connecticut town has seven workers to deliver mail to 2,800 people and fewer homes. The situation is at the center of deep trouble in the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).
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The USPS will not acknowledge in how it operates that many Americans do not need physical mail delivery. Many of these only receive junk mail. Bills and important documents can be sent electronically, along with “letters” in the form of an email. All these communications can be done within seconds instead of over several days.
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An additional practice the USPS should encourage is using FedEx and UPS. It is another way the USPS can be made much smaller. This, in turn, would cut the agency’s number of workers and allow it to cut both expensive offices and its massive fleet of trucks.

Yet another way the USPS could decrease costs is to eliminate the practice of six-day-a-week delivery. It is hard to show that Americans need mail to be delivered more than twice a week.
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The USPS continues to lose money. It prides itself on the size of its workforce and fleet of vehicles. Instead, management should be ashamed of its size, which reflects inefficiency. Packages and mail are delivered in an average of fewer than three days. With an organization of over 600,000, it is a wonder it takes that long.
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The USPS has a long-term strategic plan called “Delivering for America.” Management describes it as a “10-year transformation plan.” The only plan the USPS should have is to cut service and end the existence of the small-town post office with seven workers.

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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.

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