No Saturday Mail? 4 Reactions

A few early reactions to the Postal Service's decision to scrap mail on Saturdays:

• Eh, who cares: "I don’t really consider this a big change," writes Ed Morrissey at Hot Air. "After all, what I don’t get on Saturday, I’ll still get on Monday. Most of my first-class mail is either bills or letters from friends—at least the mail I actually care about—none of which are particularly urgent. Anything urgent comes to me by FedEx or UPS in most cases, or electronically in others."

• Bad move: The USPS thinks this will save money, but it's a classic death-spiral business move, writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet. Cutting services will only cause more customers—Netflix, maybe?—to flee and make the red ink worse. Besides, we still need snail mail. "It would be great if universal Internet access could replace these services, but we're still not there yet. We may never be."
• It's your fault: Admit it, you've carped about the price of stamps. Well, 46 cents to send a letter anywhere in the US is cheap, writes Paul Waldman at American Prospect. FedEx or UPS happily charge $10 or $20 to provide the same service. Doubling the price of stamps to 92 cents would put the US more in line with the rest of the world and solve the USPS budget problems. "But you'd never stand for that, would you?"
• All about the numbers: Jordan Weissmann at the Atlantic provides a look at the USPS numbers in graph form, and they're not pretty. It's tough to argue with the need to cut the number of hours worked and the amount of fuel burned.

(More USPS stories.)