U.s. Postal Service | featured news

The U.S. Postal Service says it will delay plans to cut Saturday mail delivery because Congress isn't allowing the change. The Postal Service said in February that it planned to cut back in August to five-day-a-week deliveries for everything except packages, as a way to hold down losses.

The financially beleaguered Postal Service suffered a setback in its plan to end Saturday delivery of first-class mail as Congress on Thursday passed legislation requiring six-day delivery.

The U.S. Postal Service lost $1.3 billion in the October to December quarter, an official said on Friday, days after the beleaguered mail agency announced plans to cut back on Saturday delivery to save money.

Netflix won't miss Saturday mail delivery, even though the weekend service helped keep the company's DVD-by-mail subscribers happy. The U.S. Postal Service's planned shift to five days of home delivery a week instead of six may even make Netflix Inc. slightly more profitable by lowering the costs for sending out its familiar red envelopes with DVDs. That's because subscribers may be able to watch fewer DVDs for the same monthly price.

The U.S. Postal   Service will stop delivering mail on Saturdays but continue to deliver packages six days a week under a plan aimed at saving about $2 billion annually, the financially struggling agency says.

About 25,500 front-office clerks, mail handlers, drivers and other employees have accepted an early-retirement offer from the U.S. Postal Service, among the money-losing agency's largest efforts in recent years to shed employees.

Emboldened by rapid growth in e-commerce shipping, the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service is moving aggressively this holiday season to start a premium service for the Internet shopper seeking the instant gratification of a store purchase: same-day package delivery.

Its first-class mail volume dropping, the Postal Service hopes to substitute marketing material, even as consumers seek ways to block the catalogs and credit card applications.

A report says the U.S. Postal Service wasted $1.2 million by selling less than a third of its 1 billion "The Simpsons" commemorative stamps. Bloomberg's Angela Greiling Keane writes that the inspector general of the money-losing USPS singled out overproduction of commemorative stamps as one example of not properly gauging the needs of customers.

In the midst of the Postal Service's economic problems, CNN visits the nation's only all-volunteer post office.