Reduced hours for rural post offices

Five local post offices will be open shorter hours in an effort to save the U.S. Post Service money. The post offices in Brighton, Keota and Wayland will drop their hours from eight per day to six. Crawfordsville and Ainsworth?s post offices will have their days cut in half from eight hours to four.

The U.S. Postal Service issued a press release in May in which it wrote that the new hours for the retail windows are intended to match customer use. The hour reductions do not affect lobby hours.

U.S. Postal Service communications specialist Richard Watkins said the reduction in hours will not take effect for several months and may not take effect for a few years. He said the postal service will meet with the affected communities beginning after Labor Day. The postal service expects the changes to be implemented over a period of two years ending in September 2014.

Watkins said the postal service has met with small communities over the past 18 months about possible closures. West Chester was one of those towns that had meetings last summer about its post office, which was ultimately closed. He said, even though usage is down, small towns feel the post office is a big part of their community.

Watkins said that people across the country are visiting post offices less and less. He said between 2006 and 2011, there were 200 million fewer visits to post offices in the country than the prior five years. He said the post office has not been tax supported since 1982, and that it is expected to do more even with less revenue coming in.

?Even when the economy tanked in 2008 and 2009, we were still adding three-quarters of a million new sites to our network,? he said. ?That meant we had to spend more on fuel for the vehicles. We are losing $25 million a day. That is hardly a business model for success.?

The reduction in post office hours planned over the next two years is expected to save the postal service $500 million annually. While this will only reduce the postal service?s labor costs, Watkins said labor costs represent 80 percent of the postal service?s fixed costs.

Watkins said that, instead of accepting reduced hours, a community may decide to create a ?village post office? in place of its traditional post office. A village post office means the postal service contracts with a building, such as a convenience store or gas station, to provide basic postal services such as accepting letters and selling stamps. Some village post offices that are open for long hours could housing post office boxes.

According to a U.S. Postal Service press release which cited survey data from the Opinion Research Corporation (ORC), 54 percent of rural customers would prefer the new solution to maintain a local post office. Forty-six percent prefer another solution. Among all respondents, 20 percent prefer a village post office, 15 percent prefer providing services at a nearby Post Office and 11 percent prefer expanded rural delivery.