The Postal Service has several things in progress….and some Missourians might be having trouble keeping them straight. We’re dealing with a change in postal standards, the consolidation of service centers, and the planned closing of dozens of local post offices in Missouri.
We’ve consulted with service spokesman Valerie Welch in the St. Louis regional office to get straightened out.
interview with valerie welch 19:12 mp3
The closings of local post offices won’t start happening until after Christmas. There’s no specific date for closings to begin.
Those offices are serviced by regional sorting centers. Some of them–Cape Girardeau and Springfield, for example—will close in March and their duties will move to St. Louis and Kansas City. That will slow deliveries so that means existing delivery standards will be changing after March.
Welch says all of this is caused by a 25 percent drop in first class mail use. “We need people to write letters!” she says. “And the sad things is that kids today don’t know how to address a letter. /They don’t even know how to write one. They know how to instant text…and stuff like that. /But they really have no letter-writing skills and that’s kind of sad.”
She says the Postal Service is joining the electronic environment. She says its mobile aps are some of the most used mobile aps in the country. She says the postal services just has to get people used to using its aps and other online services so it can attract younger customers that have grown up in a mobile, electrictronic society.
Welch says the postal service has to do what a lot of traditional information delivery systems are doing—find a niche that’s profitable.
