Blue Stone Press, March 6, 2015 , Page
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Jillian NadiakBSP Reporter
Due to the closing of the Newburgh mail distribution center, not
only were 360 jobs lost according to a Fiscal Policy Insti-tute
Report, but when you mail a letter from your town to the town next
door, it now takes a bit of a detour.
When mail is dropped off at a local post office or picked up
from your mailbox, it is processed according to particular ranges
of zip codes that identify which process-ing plant to be sent too.
If the mail is local, than it is then collected from local post
offices and then brought to the Kingston post office in NY. Its
journey doesnt end in Kingston though. Instead of taking its normal
trip to Newburgh, it is now trans-ported to the USPS Albany
Processing and Distribution Center, which serves as a processing
hub.
This has had an effect on many busi-nesses in our area including
the Blue Stone Press. In the process of our day to day business we
hear that there are a lot of misunderstandings and concerns about
how much time the mail is taking to get from business to business,
residence to residence locally, said publisher of the BlueStone
Press Lori Childers. Theres a misunderstanding about how far the
mail has to travel to get to one of our local hamlets.
With the price of the stamp increasing three cents in January,
it would be hoped that a letter would travel faster. In addi-tion
to increasing the number of days your mail is en route, it puts a
heavier burden on all the facilities at a local level that cant get
the influx of mail out the door until much later in the day, said
Rosendale resident, Jay Galione, director of the docu-mentary Gone
Postal. Letter carriers are regularly out after dark, in icy
conditions, sorting through mail while hustling from door to door.
The risk of injury increases. And when you are injured on the job
at the Postal Service you are challenged to prove it wasnt your
fault. With all of these increasing pressures the morale within the
organization suffers and the stress rises.
With the advancement of technology, an old-fashioned letter is
hard to come by now-a-days. Businesses encourage paperless billing
(for the environment and for cost-saving sake) so now even our
bills can be paid online. Even our junk mail has taken the tech
savvy approach thus find-ing its way into our spam boxes-stamps
unnecessary.
As of Jan. 2015, the postal service
changed its First-Class mail service stan-dards, which has led
to change in delivery speed we are witnessing today. Effecting
roughly 14 billion pieces of the total vol-ume (or 9 percent) and
up to 16 percent of First-Class mail, local delivery now takes two
days instead of one. Sending mail anywhere else in the country will
take up to three days.
The connection between the plant closures and service standards
is com-plex, said Steve Hutkins, from Rhine-beck founder of
savethepostoffice.com and literature professor at New York
University. But the gist of it is simply that if the Postal Service
has more time to pro-cess the mail (basically an extra day), they
need fewer plants (partly because theres now enough time for the
mail to travel further, partly because sorting machines can be used
more hours per day, etc.).
First-Class mail consists of general correspondence, bill
payments, greeting cards and the like. In the past 10 years, total
volume has declined by more than 26 percent First-Class Mail volume
has declined by 35 percent, and single-piece First-Class Mail has
declined more than 50 percent. according to the United States
Postal Services website.
According to a page detailing the USPSs future network, stamped
letter mail vol-ume has been decreasing for a decade and will
continue to decline. With numbers like this, it would make sense
that a reform was needed.
Though the postal service is a govern-ment system, it receives
no funding from taxes. It operates solely on the revenues from the
sales and services it provides. When paired with the decrease in
first-class mail, this led to a recorded $26 bil-lion loss over the
past three years.
In 2012, a business strategy called Post Plan was put into
effect. Post Plan is designed to keep the nations smaller post
offices open for business; not close them, said George B. Flood,
spokesperson for the USPS in the northeast area. This has led to
the modification of retail window hours to match customer use.
Although First-Class mail seems to be taking this reform the
hardest, there is no need to worry about our packages. According to
the Key Facts on Network Rationalization press release in Nov.
2014, Package Services and Priority Mail will not be affected and
will be delivered based on current service standards.
For more information visit gonepostal-film.com or
savethepostoffice.com.
Why does the mail take so long?
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