Mail on Saturday Could Get Sacked

There will be no more Saturday delivery of mail, come 2011 or so. The U.S. Postal Service is serious about cutting back to a Monday to Friday schedule -- a plan that the strapped agency figures will save it at least $3 billion a year.

Congress will grudgingly go along, though not until after the 2010 elections. Lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle are reluctantly coming to the conclusion that USPS cost cutting and much higher postal rates can't bail the service out of the deepening hole it's in. They know that rate hikes will only accelerate the inexorable erosion of mail volume.

It'll mean a big shift for many businesses: retailers, auto dealers and others that count on Saturday delivery of ads to generate weekend sales. "Typically, these operations focus on Saturday to do coordinated targeting, using ads sent by mail, as well as newspaper inserts, e-mail and Web ads. It is likely these all will move to Fridays, which may not be as effective," says Hamilton Davison, executive director of the American Catalog Mailers Association.

Only limited service is likely to be maintained: Saturday-morning hours at post offices for business pickup and Express Mail boxes in lobbies, for example. Outgoing mail won't be processed until Monday. Look for businesses to lean more on third-party services that use software to determine the best days of the week to mail everything from bills to promotions and reach the majority of their target consumers, says Angelo Anagnostopoulos, vice president for postal affairs with GrayHair Software, a postal analysis firm in New Jersey.

Postal officials see axing mail pickup and delivery and other postal services on Saturdays as being least disruptive to operations. Saturday mail volume is lower than that of other days -- around 11 percent of a typical week's total.

However, postal officials haven't ruled out restoring full mail service on Saturdays during the year-end holiday season, which brings heavy volume. Also under consideration: limited Saturday service to deliver mail-order prescription drugs to consumers.