Jul-7th-2010
What days are the post office and stock market closed for 4th of July?
Since the 4th is on a Sunday, will the stock market and post offices be closed on Friday or Monday? Will there be any Saturday mail delivery? Do they even deliver on Saturdays anymore? I heard they were going to discontinue that.
Saturday delivery is here to stay until at least a year from now. Congress has to approve such a change, and it’s been shelved for now.
Whenever Christmas, New Year’s Day, 4th of July or Veterans Day (November 11) falls on a Sunday, the postal holiday will be the following Monday.
To Flower: Twice a day delivery worked when every town had a post office that processed its own mail inside the facility, by hand, as you say. That disappeared in 1950 when the population reached 150 million and centralized processing and distribution became necessary. More and more delivery addresses resulting from the post-WWII housing boom made it impossible to keep doing it the old way. Now there’s twice as many people in the country – 300 million – but far more than twice as many postal addresses – businesses, residences and boxes, over 150 million, more than there were people in 1950. Families are much smaller, broken up, scattered due to societal change. People move more, don’t stay in the same town anymore, unlike 60 years ago when people stayed where they were born, and the local postal clerk knew every family name.
When I started in 1979, I worked with a handful of guys who came in right after the war and were on the cusp of retirement. They worked the two-a-days. Their routes in this city of 250 thousand at the time, with tiny suburbs, averaged 150 stops. It would take them an hour or less to case letters, sort flats by street and hand-collate them into delivery order, organize packages, and pull it down for the street. It would take them maybe another 2-3 hours to deliver it, then come back and do it again. They still had some time to kill, though they’d never admit it in front of a boss.
Those were the old days. Today, the metro area where I live is a million plus people, more than three times what it was in 1950, but the more-centralized city is smaller by almost $100,000. The suburbs are sprawling. Now, walking routes average 400+ stops, in the ‘burbs, and 600 in the city. We’re in the office a total of two hours or less, casing only 10% of our total letter volume and casing flats the same way as letters, with the letters. No more hand-collating, which was very inefficient. We’re casing more mail in less time, and then taking 90% of the letter mail that comes in from the central office already sequenced for delivery. On top of that, we have other pre-sequenced advertising that’s one for every stop on the route, 3-4 days per week. All of that requires mass, centralized processing and distribution.
Hand-sorting is very inefficient. But for the time it was done, it was the best way. Mass, centralized processing and distribution was already being used in 1950 in large population centers, but it would have been too expensive and underutilized for servicing the small towns where the majority of people were living.
Yes there is Saturday delivery still. They will be closed on Monday July 5th. No matter what the postal service does it wont clear their deficit. We should return to the government management of the Post Office. That was more efficient, strangely enough. Years ago we had two deliveries per day when it was sorted by hand. We should go back to that. I realize that postage is no longer 3 cents.