Thank A Mailman Day 2025 is on Tuesday, February 4, 2025: USPS 5 day Opinions!!!?

Tuesday, February 4, 2025 is Thank A Mailman Day 2025. Thank a Mailman Day! Thank a Mailman Day Postcard

It's hard work delivering the mail day in, day out, come rain or luster. Thank A Mailman Day provides you a possibility to say a courteous 'thanks' to your postal messenger, parcel solution, and good old mailman.

Eliminating one day of delivery won't save the money USPS management thinks it will. It will eliminate the utility position (it wasn't called T6 until maybe 10 years ago), which is roughly 14% of the carrier workforce (There is one T6 for every 5 regular carriers, but there is also about one reserve regular/unassigned regular/PTF carrier for every 5 regulars) but by the time routes are readjusted to handle the extra daily volume, which now goes up by 20% (That 100% of one day's mail spread out over 5), the cost saving will not be 14% of the current manpower cost. It will be less.

Either overtime will have to be paid on the heaviest days, or routes will have to be adjusted to be smaller on the street, more time in the office, or a combination of both. The way it is now, Mondays are the heaviest day of the week, and overtime is sometimes being paid to handle the heavy volume machine-sorted letter mail. Eliminating Saturday will only make Mondays even worse. Saturdays were once the lightest day of the week, back when I started 30+ years ago. That's because mail that local businesses sent out on Friday wasn't processed in time for Saturday delivery, it would arrive Monday, and incoming business mail from other parts of the state and country sent out on Friday would be delivered locally Tuesday or Wednesday. With the streamlined processing system we have now (which has eliminated thousands of clerk jobs, from when everything was hand-sorted), local mail sent Friday is there Saturday and so is much of what comes to us from many surrounding states. Saturdays are now one of the heavier days. Tuesdays and Thursdays are the lightest, and eliminating either of those makes more sense if it ends up being necessary, but pressure from businesses will probably kill that idea.

Any increase in overtime will cut into the cost savings from eliminating manpower costs. Any adjustments to routes that end up creating more routes, which will absorb some of those T6 carriers, reduces the amount of manpower savings from 14% to less, and how much less, and how much overtime, are questions USPS cannot answer.

Another argument against eliminating one day of service is that any time you cut back on a service, you create an opportunity for someone else to step in. If we aren't delivering packages on Saturdays, UPS might start. They don't now, except during the Christmas rush. Congress has always resisted the idea of ending the USPS monopoly on 1st class mail delivery, but eliminating one day will make that resistance come under greater pressure from private carriers. Believe me when I tell you that UPS and FedEx do not want to take away mail delivery for themselves. They do not want to go door to door. That is what costs the most money. Already, they are dumping off a good portion of their package delivery to USPS for 'last mile' delivery. These companies still get the lions's share of the shipping charge and pay USPS a small handling fee (exactly how much I have never gotten an intelligent answer to from management, so I don't know if we're making or losing money on this deal, and I don't think management knows, either - but it creates more jobs for management (and I'm not hearing anything about reduced management jobs if one day of delivery goes away). Who DOES want 1st class mail delivery are small private courier services who can go into the high-volume cities, where volume alone will allow them to reduce postage and make a profit, but leave the unprofitable rest of the country to USPS. If Congress ever allows that to happen, the taxpayer WILL begin to subsidize the cost of operating USPS, which is now run entirely on postage and service revenues. Taxpayers will, in effect, be subsidizing the profits of these private companies.

I think it's a bad idea to reduce service. Any time you do, people will look elsewhere. Nothing at all should be done until the flat sorting system is fully implemented. That will have a huge impact on the size of the workforce, as it did when machine-sorted letters came along. Carrier sorting time will shrink even more, routes will get longer and fewer of them will exist, and there's your workforce reduction. Any serious look at eliminating a day of service needs to wait until this system is fully in place, over the next 3-5 years.