ALBANY, N.Y. - The U.S. Postal Service announced Wednesday they will stop delivering mail on Saturdays in a last ditch measure to save the financially struggling agency billions.
According to the U.S. Postmaster General and CEO, Patrick Donahue, it is a move that has been long coming and much-needed, saying "tough decisions had to be made to save the Postal Service from fiscal disaster." Reducing six-day letter service to five days a week will add up to $2 billion in savings.
The change also answers the post office's supply and demand. Over the past few years, package delivery has risen 14 percent, but letter delivery has declined.
Donahue says unfortunately jobs will be affected. "The Saturday jobs that we have for letter carriers, the Saturday jobs we have for our rural carriers, we also have processing clerks and mail handlers who work in the evening at our processing plants, and several other jobs, and those are all the jobs that'll be affected."
The new letter delivery schedule is set to begin in August.
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