The Beginning of the End? US Postal Service Will Stop Delivering Saturday Mail

Neither snow nor rain nor heat…nor weekends. That’ll be the new motto of the US Postal Services beginning in August, when they start cutting all Saturday mail delivery. (Packages, which are apparently in demand compared to letters, will keep on keeping on.) The measure, which will be announced later today, is supposed to save $2 billion a year.

Potential roadblock: Despite getting no federal funding, USPS is controlled by Congress, which has repeatedly refused to grant it permission to cut Saturday mail. So either they’ve engineering some way around that, or this is a massive bluff. For the record: The postal workers union, which has voted “no confidence” in postmaster general Patrick Donahoe, has other ideas on how to cut costs without eliminating days. Read about them in this recent Esquire longread about the struggles facing the USPS. [AP]