Petersburgh Post Office – No Big Changes After All

by Alex Brooks
The U.S. Postal Service has initiated a nationwide review of small post offices to seek ways to provide postal service in a more cost effective way. The rise of digital communication has reduced postal revenue and made some small post offices into places without much activity.
[private]The Postal Service has been closing some post offices and reducing hours at others. They are seeking locally established businesses to provide postal services, either in addition to the regular post office or instead of it. The review of local post offices in process now they call the “POST Plan.” The USPS is expecting to reduce its costs by a total of $1.2 billion annually when the POST Plan has been fully implemented.
Part of this plan is to conduct a survey of postal customers to ask their preferences. The survey of Petersburgh postal customers was launched in November, and on Tuesday, December 4, a meeting was held at the Petersburgh Post Office to announce the results of the surveys and to inform the public about what was likely to happen to the Petersburgh Post Office. On hand to speak with the public was the Postal Operations Manager for the Capital City East District, Carol Capone.
She said the Postal Service is sorting post offices based on their workload, traffic and revenue and reducing hours accordingly. She said Petersburgh fairly comfortably qualifies as a six hour a day post office. The current window hours are 6¼ hours per day, so the window hours will only be reduced by 15 minutes.
Capone said she did not know how much revenue the Petersburgh Post Office takes in, but she said if she had to guess, she would guess about $6,000 per month. The Petersburgh Post Office is one of the larger ones in the immediate area because they handle delivery for most of Berlin and part of Grafton, in addition to Petersburgh itself.
The Postal Service mailed 1,241 surveys out, and 366 were returned.
There were four choices. The first was to leave things pretty much as is, with revised hours. The second was for a study of discontinuing the post office but maintaining rural delivery service. The third was discontinuing the post office and have a local business take over postal services, and the last was to close the post office and provide service from another nearby post office. Not surprising, of the people who returned their surveys, 83% chose the first option. But 30 people chose the second, seven people chose the third, and three chose the fourth. There was also space for input on preferred hours and additional comments.
The survey report said window hours in Petersburgh are likely to be 8:15 am to 12:15 pm and 2:45 to 4:45 pm. Saturday hours will not change, remaining 9 to 11:30 am.
About 25 people showed up for the meeting. Most were expecting more drastic changes and were relieved to hear that Petersburgh is losing only a quarter hour of window time.
Capone said she is not sure exactly when the changes will be implemented, but probably some time around the end of January.[/private]