U.S Postal Service shouldn't keep all offices open
Recommendations by a federal study panel to cut back on small- town post offices and establish new services in malls, banks and grocery stories will produce an inevitable backlash. After all, if you lose your ZIP code, you’re nowhere, right?
Though the proposals may require people to use a different location for mail, it doesn’t make sense to keep spending millions of dollars to staff and maintain miniscule facilities that do very little business.
The U.S. Postal Service has 35,000 offices, many serving tiny communities quite near to others. In Maine, which has 460 offices, Standish has one in its shopping center with a rented postal box substation at Sebago Lake Station, only about 3 miles away. A third office is in Steep Falls, which is also part of Standish, but this one is only a few miles from the Limington office.
The town of York also has three offices, and there are six in one 15-mile stretch of the midcoast from Boothbay to Wiscasset.
Though Maine’s congressional delegation always pledges to keep small-town offices open, there comes a time when such “constituent service” benefits a few at a great expense to many more.
When nostalgia costs big bucks, we should rethink our love of the past.
