The U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors said yesterday it will continue to deliver mail six days a week after a study found that cutting back would cause mailers to shift to alternative shippers.
The USPS also said that the costs of shifting to a five-day-a-week schedule would be high. It declined to elaborate.
This comes less than a week after DIRECT Newsline learned that USPS CFO Richard Strasser, was set to tell the BOG that the U.S. Postal Service is in better financial shape than initially thought. (DIRECT Newsline. July 9, 2001).
Specifically, the USPS will end its fiscal year in September with a deficit of somewhere between $900 million and $1.5 billion instead of the earlier predicted $2 billion to $3 billion. He attributed the two postage rate increases this year as reasons for the new outlook.
The postal service has long lobbied Congress and the White House for reforms that would give it more flexibility to raise prices and to negotiate contracts with its labor unions.
In other matters, the BOG agreed to look into consolidating some USPS facilities to help rein in costs, a move applauded by the Direct Marketing Association.
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