Last week the Postal Service submitted to the Postal Regulatory Commission its Request for an Advisory Opinion on POStPlan — the plan to reduce the hours at 13,000 small post offices. These downgraded offices will be called Remotely Managed Post Offices (RMPOs), meaning that the full-time postmaster responsible for administering the office will be located at another post office. Along … Read More
The Postal Service submits a Request for an Advisory Opinion on POStPlan: How changing the rules changed everything
Today the Postal Service asked the Postal Regulatory Commission for an Advisory Opinion on POStPlan, the initiative to review about 13,000 post offices for discontinuance or reduced hours. The Request is here. Along with the Request is testimony from Jeffrey C. Day, Manager, Retail Operations, in the Office of Delivery and Post Office Operations at the Postal Service. Day’s testimony … Read More
How the West was won: The PMG’s trip to Montana
In April of this year, as the moratorium on post office closings was coming to an end and thousands of communities were anxiously awaiting the verdict on their post office, the Postmaster General took some time out of his busy schedule to fly to Montana, just to talk with a few regular folks about the closings. The motive for the … Read More
POStPlan: Map, Charts, & More
On May 9, the Postal Service released POStPlan, its new plan for small rural post offices. The plan will impact 13,000 post offices. Over the coming months, the Postal Service will begin holding community meetings to discuss the options: replace the post office with a "village post office" (a postal counter in a private business), close the post office and switch … Read More
POStPlan by the numbers
The Postal Service's POStPlan initiative announced on May 9, 2012, would reduce hours at 13,000 post offices from eight hours a day to six, four, and in some cases, two. Here's how the list provided by the Postal Service breaks down. (An overview of the plan is here.) The plan would reduce the total number of operating hours per day at … Read More
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse: The Postal Service has a new plan for the post office
After a year and a half spent threatening to close thousands of rural post offices, the Postal Service has suddenly changed course. Instead of closing small post offices, the Postal Service has come up with a way to make them irrelevant. The Postal Service’s new plan — awkwardly named "Post Office Structure Plan," or POStPlan — will reduce the hours … Read More
Avalanche averted: Postal Service backs off plan to close thousands of post offices
The Postal Service has decided not to announce mass post office closures on May 16, when the moratorium ends, and it will instead proceed with the closings in a more gradual way. How many, how slowly, remains to be seen. In the meantime, the Postal Service has a new plan. Some of the details were revealed to postmasters in a … Read More
The Twisted Logic of the Postal Service: Fewer post offices, and more post offices without a postmaster
It takes a lot of imagination to destroy an institution as big and durable as the U. S. Postal Service, but the executives in L'Enfant Plaza keep coming up with bold new ideas for doing just that. Today the Postal Service published its “Final Rule” on “amending its regulations to improve the administration of the Post Office closing and consolidation … Read More
