A rarity in future: New post offices
Suburban growth is generating thousands of new addresses in bedroom communities around Jacksonville. But the U.S. Postal Service hasn’t built a new post office in the metropolitan area since 2001.
Instead, the U.S. Postal Service is leasing space in shopping centers for post offices or installing postal counters inside other businesses, such as pharmacies and convenience stores.
The old model of building a stand-alone post office in a fast-growing community has gone the way of the 39-cent stamp.
John Mica, U.S. Rep. said convincing postal authorities to build more branches has always been challenging, but it’s become tougher as e-mail and fax machines take business from first-class mail. The Postal Service relies primarily on income it gets from selling stamps and other services while delivering 213 billion pieces of mail a year.
Northwest St. Johns County has been a testing ground of how the Postal Service’s approach will work. It has agreed to move its 2,800-square-foot branch to another leased site near Florida 13 and Race Track Road.
Postal Service spokesman Bill Tyler said moving to the planned 3,600-square-foot site will allow more customer windows and shorter waits. The move to the Bartram Walk Shopping Center is scheduled to happen by September 2008.
He said more customers are doing their postal transactions online at usps.com, which started in 1997. The site averages 26 million visitors a month, and the average order is $80, according to the U.S. Postal Service. Tyler said the more people who go online, the less time they spend waiting in line, which also reduces the need for new brick-and-mortar postal branches. For those who just need stamps, machines are often all they need.
The last time the Postal Service built its own post office in the metropolitan area was six years ago, when it opened an 8,200-square-foot facility on College Drive in Clay County.
In the suburbs, that could be the future trend for a trip to the post office – fill up with gas and send a package at the same place.
