Post Office Lost $1B in 3rd Quarter

Decline in regular mail more than offsets gift shipping bump

(NEWSER) - The US Postal Service had a jaw-droppingly ugly holiday quarter, losing $3.3 billion despite a better-than-expected surge in gift shipments, the agency announced today. That's $3 billion worse than its figure for the same period in 2010, the AP reports, and at this rate the agency expects to run out of dough by October. The problem is that traditional mail delivery continues to plummet—it fell 6% in the first fiscal quarter, which ended Dec. 31. More»

But also some heroism ...

(NEWSER) - The Washington Post checks out a watchdog report about the nation's 574,000 mail carriers and finds some doozies:

• A Maryland carrier admitted to burning piles of mail in an abandoned lot and was sentenced to six months in jail.
• A carrier in Cincinnati stole $10,000 in cash and $1,000 in gift cards and pleaded guilty to mail theft.

Half of USPS mail processing centers to shut down this spring

(NEWSER) - Get ready to wait an extra day for the next DVD of The Wire: The mail is going to slow down. As part of its plan to save $3 billion, the cash-challenged US Postal Service will be closing roughly half of its 500 mail processing centers as soon as next March, a move that could bring new meaning to the term "snail mail," the AP reports. The plan will make next-day delivery of first-class mail a thing of the past, and deal a serious blow to things like time-sensitive magazines, mail-order prescription drugs, and Netflix. More»

Neither rain nor sleet nor ... bad handwriting

(NEWSER) - The United States Postal Service has no shortage of public headaches —but the Wall Street Journal takes a look at a quirky problem that's a little more under-the-radar: your bad handwriting. The USPS employs 1,900 clerks who show up for work at one of two "Remote Encoding Centers" and then try to make sense of horrifically unreadable addresses. Their ranks used to be much larger: 32,000 clerks at some 55 RECs. Thanks to technological advances, computers can decode most chicken-scratch. Scanned images of the unreadable ones end up in Salt Lake City or Wichita. More»

It will cost 45 cents to mail a first-class letter in January

(NEWSER) - Given the dire financial straits of the Postal Service, this shouldn't be a huge surprise: The price of a stamp is going up a penny to 45 cents in January, reports the Washington Post . The first hike in more than two years is expected to pull in an extra $888 million in revenue, says the USPS. Postcards are going up 3 cents to 32 cents, though Express Mail and Priority Mail won't change. International letters will go up 7 cents to $1.05, except for Canada and Mexico letters, which will cost 85 cents. More»