America needs a smaller Postal Service!

America needs a smaller Postal Service

The U.S. Postal Service is considering closing hundreds of post offices, including five around Roanoke. A place remains in America for snail mail, but the service is wise to slim its operations.
If you stop to think about it, the mail is almost magical. Anyone can affix a stamp that costs less than a soda to an envelope, drop it into a blue box on the corner and expect it to arrive at its destination across the country, even across the world, in just a few days.
New magics, however, have overtaken it. More people use the Internet and cellphones to keep in touch. Fewer people subscribe to magazines. They pay their bills online. And the recession has hammered direct marketing. The postal service delivers less mail than it did just a few years ago, and that has left gaping holes in its budget.
Indeed, the numbers have dropped precipitously just since last year.
First class mail, which includes most letters and bills citizens send, were off 7.8 percent in the second quarter of 2009 compared to 2008. On the plus side for citizens, if not postal revenue, standard mail, which includes most junk mail, fell even more dramatically, down 19 percent year-to-year.
There is still plenty of mail to deliver, though. Mail carriers handled 91.7 million pieces of first class mail last year. Some people do not have good Internet access; some prefer the permanency of paper.
The smaller market needs only a streamlined postal service. Fewer post offices will help, and the closures under consideration seem mostly logical. Roanoke could get by with fewer than 11 post offices in and around the city.
The only local office on the possible cut list we dispute is the one downtown on Church Avenue. Closure should not be an option for the office that serves downtown businesses and workers. Maybe delivery could be routed through another office, but drop-off services and sales should remain there.
Perhaps someday postal mail will become obsolete. That day has not yet arrived.

Source-Roanoke.com