How About Mail Only Three Days a Week?

As the debate rages over whether the Postal Service should be allowed to reduce mail delivery from six days a week to five (an idea that so far, is not going over well in Congress), the USPS Office of the Inspector General has floated an even more provocative idea on its blog: Why not cut it down to three days?

Under that approach, some homes would get mail on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, while others received it on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Savings could amount to $10 billion a year.

What's more, the authors of the blog post argue, "delivering three days per week roughly doubles the amount of mail a household receives on a given day, making the 'mail moment' of receiving mail more significant."

Judging from the comments on the post, though, it's fair to say the idea isn't going over too well internally at the Postal Service. "Just when I thought 5-day delivery was a dumb idea, someone comes up with an even dumber one," writes one respondent. "Stupidity is non-stop!"