Information Madness

It was announced by CNN today that the U.S. Postal Service is going to close down about 3,700 post offices in the country in order to cut into its debilitating deficits. The Postmaster General, Mr. Patrick Donahue,  released a long awaited post office study mentioning that there are 3,700 potential close downs in all the fifty states. He said that postal service of the future will be leaner, smaller and more competitive and that it will continue to deliver value by serving communities.

This move as well as that of reducing service to a five day week was essential to close a gap of almost twenty billion dollars in deficit by the year 2015.

Many people had been expecting such a move. This announcement has not come as a surprise. Last year, the Postal Service suffered a net loss of 8.5 billion dollars compared to a loss of 3.8 billion dollars in 2009. The fiscal year of the post offices is from October to September.

The justification that was given for this move was that most of the post offices being considered for closure have so little foot traffic that workers were averaging less than two hours of work per day. The average sales were less than $50 a day. The closing down of these post offices is expected to begin within the next half year. The first closing may take place by January 2012. The savings from the closing down could be as much as 200 million dollars. But the closings could cost the jobs of about three thousand postmasters, five thousand supervisors and about ten thousand clerks.

Gone are the days when we used to write inland letters and send an aerogramme to our near and dear ones.