by Jamie Bajoie

Created on: March 05, 2010   Last Updated: March 10, 2010

Is the economy not bad enough? Lets take 656,000 workers and give them one less day of work. I don't hear and outcry or see postal workers striking. The fact of the matter is the post office is there when you need it; you've had a rough week and let a couple of bills or parcels pass you, so then Saturday comes and it's like a breath of fresh air when you realize the post office is open.

In comparison many of us are happy to find out that there's a branch of our bank open on a Saturday to get those last couple of transactions in! Lets keep in mind that since the "Postal Reorganization Act" that turned the USPS into an independent government organization, they have not since the early 1980's directly received taxpayer-dollars.

So the question would be what is the point of closing doors on a Saturday. Would it be their competition from UPS, or Fedex? The decline in mail usage due to E-mail? USPS has the biggest upper hand over all it's competition; its called the "Postal Service's Monopoly" (Yes this is very real!).

Postal Service’s exclusive access to customer mailboxes, giving USPS the ability to provide affordable service. There is strict laws in place that state that ONLY the USPS worker may place mail into mailboxes. And they've also found many answers to regain balance against the forced decline due to email, Flat-Rate shipping it's something that if you've never used it, you have at least heard of it.

This is packaging that carries a single flat rate no matter what the weight of your item. You can send it for the single priced rate at no extra charge as long as it fits in the package, and there's many different sizes of packages to choose from all with various prices to choose from just depends on the consumers needs.

This is valuable during holiday season, whereas everything that use to go by weight, making it necessary to send multiple boxes, now can be jammed into one flat-rate box. No matter how you debate this issue, the USPS gives you a option to never deal with the increase of postal rates, its called the "forever" stamp.

No matter how much prices rise in the future this stamp will always be valid for 1st class mail (1 oz and under) it's sold at the first class mails current rate at the time of purchase.

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