Lightening strikes twice in the Ozarks: Another post office gets suspended

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During fiscal year 2015, the Postal Service closed about 90 post offices for emergency suspensions.  Five of them were in Missouri, and one was in the Ozark Mountains.  This week signs appeared on the door of another Ozark post office saying it would be closed soon too. In January 2015, the Postal Service suspended the post office in Rockbridge, which … Read More

Westbrookville, NY contract post office closing abruptly

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In the hamlet of Westbrookville, which sits on the border of eastern Sullivan and western Orange counties in New York, the tiny community post office is the social hub of the neighborhood. With no home mail delivery, residents are in and out every day, sometimes twice a day. They chat with neighbors and Marlene Roe, who runs the post office, … Read More

Mapping ZIP Codes as art

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Curbed: "For Paula Scher, a graphic designer and longtime partner at design firm Pentagram by day and obsessive map painter the other half of the time, maps aren't necessarily a way to convey literal information, but an opportunity to evoke emotions and deeper thought. Scher's latest show, U.S.A.—featuring 10 U.S. maps frenetically painted through provocative lenses like population demographics, extreme weather, real estate … Read More

What’s up with the cost savings for phase 2 of Network Rationalization?

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For over three years, the Postal Service has been saying that phase 2 of its Network Rationalization plan would save $750 million annually, but now that many of the plant consolidations have been fully or partly implemented, it appears that the initiative may not be saving anything like that.  In fact, phase 2 may be losing money.   As reported … Read More

Round two of Postal Pulse begins, but what happened in round one?

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According to a notice posted on USPS Blue, the Postal Service began conducting the second round of the Postal Pulse survey yesterday. Postal Pulse is the Postal Service’s name for the Gallup Q12 survey, one of the most widely used employee engagement surveys in the world.  (A copy of the Postal Pulse survey is here; its twelve questions are identical … Read More

Emergency Suspensions of Post Offices in FY 2015

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According to its Annual Compliance Reports to the Postal Regulatory Commission, the Postal Service did not discontinue a single post office in FY 2014 and FY 2015.  Thanks to public protest and pressure from Congress, there appears to be an unofficial moratorium on post office closures.  If Senator Carper’s IPOST bill becomes law, this moratorium will become official and no … Read More

USPS may have buyer for damaged Napa CA post office

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A potential buyer has been identified for the historic post office building in downtown Napa, California, but the sale is not yet complete and the bidder’s name has not been released.  The post office, which was built in 1933 in the Art Deco style, was badly damaged in the August 2014 earthquake and has remained closed since then.  In early … Read More

How the Postal Service sold Richmond’s Saunders Station PO for a song

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Back in October 2015, the Postal Service sold the historic 1937 Saunders Station post office in Richmond, Virginia.  At the time, the sale price was not made public, but as discussed in this previous post, there was reason to wonder if the sale made sense financially.  Turns out, the sale makes hardly any sense at all. A reader of STPO … Read More

How the Rise of the Post Office Explains American Innovation

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Wherever government extends its tentacles, innovation follows. To some contemporary technologists, that might sound like a joke without a punch line. But it’s a reasonable description of 19th century America, according to a new working paper by Daron Acemoglu of MIT, James Robinson of the University of Chicago, and Jacob Moscona of Harvard. The 1800s set the stage for America’s technological dominance and, … Read More