So it's finally going to happen. After years and years of incremental increases in the cost of stamps, the United States Post Office is finally going to make one big cut: No more Saturday mail. From a fiscal standpoint, it makes a whole lot more sense than charging a few more pennies for that Bart Simpson stamp or spending more money on promotion. It's the post office. We've been taking it for granted for decades.
It would be easy to blame UPS or FedEx for this. With their jet planes and fancy brown trucks, they get things where they're going with all due haste. And their commercials are funnier. Or at least they're supposed to be.
Back to the original concern: No mail on Saturday. One of the silliest joys I have in life is showing up at my mailbox and finding the mail inside. Not that our mail delivery is in any way intermittent. It's that whole rain, sleet, wind, rain thing. It shows up, but I'm not always the first to get to the box. As a working guy, it's generally my wife who would bring in the day's post, and now that he has a periodic interest in the mail, my son will retrieve it when he comes home from school. It's really only those Saturday mornings when the rest of my family is otherwise occupied and/or sleeping that I get a shot.
I suppose I could make a special effort to race my son home, or arrange my lunch period to allow for the swooping in and emptying of the mail box. Or I could begin to settle in to the two billion dollar reality that is the suspension of Saturday mail delivery. Wind or rain or sleet couldn't slow them down, but a budget deficit finally did. Alas. I'll be savoring the next few months of Saturday mornings.
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