The End of Saturday Mail Delivery: How will you cope?

You’ve probably heard by now that the U.S. Postal Service® is planning to end Saturday letter delivery starting in August 2013. Don’t panic! While this does mark the end of an era, it does not mean that you have to wait until Monday to send or receive your mail.

In reality the only thing ending on Saturday, is home and office delivery of letter mail; those letters with a $0.46 stamp, postcards and bulk mail. But, packages and Priority Mail will continue to be delivered to homes and offices on Saturday as they have been in the past. And, according to the Postmaster General, if your local Post Office has been open on Saturdays prior to August 2013 it will remain open after August 2013.

So, the Post Office will still be open on Saturday; that’s good news. This means that if your business absolutely, positively needs to send and receive letters on Saturdays you still have that option.

There are several things you can do to ensure that you can continue to send and receive your letters on Saturdays. Below are three that we can think of:

• Rent a P.O. Box for your business.

  Since the Post Office will still be open on Saturdays and USPS personnel will still be sorting and delivering mail to P.O. Boxes your mail can still be received on a Saturday. The only stipulation is that you will need to personally visit the Post Office to pick up and drop off your mail.

• Use Priority Mail.

  The USPS will continue to deliver packages and Priority Mail or Expedited Mail to homes and businesses on Saturdays. These services ship in 2 or 3 days with prices starting at approximately $5 for an envelope. Actual price may vary, depending on your business’s volume.

• Use Endicia postage solutions

  (www.endicia.com, www.DymoStamps.com, www.Postage.com) to print postage from your home or office, and then simply drop your letters in the mail slot of your local Post Office for Saturday processing.

As you can see you do have several options that will allow you to continue to send and receive mail on Saturdays. We hope one, or more, of them will work for you.

For more information on Saturday delivery, watch this interview done by MSNBC with the PostMaster General – http://video.msnbc.msn.com/msnbc/50756368/#50756368

For more news and tips, check out our FedEx vs. UPS vs. USPS shipping rates comparison page.