Post office closings

The pace of post office closings and appeals is picking up, and it’s only going to get worse over the coming months.  If Congress doesn’t do something soon, by the end of the year we’re going to see post offices closing at a rate of several per day. An updated list of the post offices that have closed, been suspended, … Read More

The Postal Service is well on its way in the closure process for most of the post offices in the Retail Access Optimization Initiative (RAOI).  Many of these 3,652 post offices have already had a public hearing, and questionnaires are being distributed and other data gathered as part of the process.  Some of these post offices could start closing before … Read More

Among the issues being examined by the Postal Regulatory Commission as part of its Advisory Opinion on the Retail Access Optimization Initiative (RAOI) plan to close 3,652 post offices is how far away the nearest post office is to each post office being studied for closure.  In its initial presentation to the PRC, the Postal Service provided a chart showing … Read More

The Postal Service announced this week that it will be studying 251 mail processing facilities for consolidation.  That's in addition to about 40 plants that had already been initiated for study prior to the announcement.  If all of these plants were to close, it would reduce the "area mail processing" (AMP) network by over half.   The Postal Service provided … Read More

The Postal Service has been producing lists of post offices it wants to close since early 2009, and there have been so many, it’s almost impossible to keep them straight.  Even the experts can get them mixed up. For example, earlier this month, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) published a report for Congress about post office closings called “The U.S. … Read More

The Postal Service can be very withholding about information.  It doesn’t like to give out any more than necessary, and sometimes it gives out less than required by law.  The AWPU has filed a suit against the USPS for withholding information about postal facility consolidations.  The lack of information is particularly problematic when it comes to lists. The list for … Read More

Iowa has about 960 post offices, and there are 180 on the closing list.  That’s almost 20% of Iowa’s post offices, and almost twice the national average of about 11% (3,600 out of 32,000).  And that's on top of the 80 or so already marked for closing.  Iowa Backroads is doing a fantastic job keeping track of all the closings … Read More

While it’s going to take a while to process all the data on what the Postal Service closure plan represents, it might be useful to focus on one state just to get a preliminary idea of what’s happening.  Let’s start with New York State. New York has about 2,100 post offices, and there are 110 on the closing list, so … Read More

Yesterday the Postal Service released its Final Rule on procedural changes for closing post offices.  It contains many interesting points, but none more eye-opening than the Postal Service’s claim that it has no program to study the closing of a significant number of post offices nationwide.  Yes, you read that right.  The Postal Service is saying that it has not … Read More

How fast can you close a post office?  Not as fast as the Postal Service would like.  But luckily for the USPS, they have a new computer tool to help them speed up the process.  More on that, but first some background. Under current law (US Code Title 39) and regulations (Code of Federal Regulations—CFR 39), it takes the Postal … Read More