US Postal Service to cut Saturday mail delivery

WASHINGTON - The United States Postal Service (USPS) announced on Wednesday it planned to end Saturday mail delivery from August 5 this year as an effort to save two billion US dollars each year.

The financially struggling company said it will deliver mail Monday through Friday for the first time in its history, but will continue to deliver package on Saturday.

A view shows US postal service mail boxes at a post office in Encinitas, California Feb 6, 2013. [Photo/Agencies]

Over the past several years, the Postal Service has advocated shifting to a five-day delivery schedule for mail and package, but this time the agency kept Saturday package delivery as it was one of the few business units that witnessed a strong growth.

It is still unclear whether the Postal Service can enforce the plan because the US Congress has the final say over the agency reform and may pass a bill in the next six months to disapprove the newly-proposed delivery schedule as it had done in the past.

However, the Postal Service is in urgent need of cost saving measures, as it suffered a 15.9-billion-dollar net loss for fiscal 2012 ended September 30, which was three times the loss recorded a year earlier.

The record loss was mainly due to communication evolvement. Nowadays more people shift to emails and online bill paying services, which increasingly drove down traditional mail volume. The huge loss can also be attributed to a 2006 law that requires it to pay about 5.5 billion dollars a year into a future retiree health benefit fund.  Last year, for the first time, the agency defaulted on two payments after it had reached its borrowing limit from the Treasury Department.

The Postal Serve is an independent agency of the US government and the only US delivery service that reaches every address in the country, involving 151 million residences and businesses. It receives no funding from government but is under the oversight of the Congress.