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USPS five-day delivery week could hurt e-commerce
The US Postal Service is thinking of curtailing deliveries. Postmaster General John Potter asked Congress on Wednesday to allow the postal service to go to a five-day delivery week in an effort to cut costs and bring ballooning operating deficits under control.
USPS has been hit hard by the rise of e-mail, which has dramatically decreased the number of letters and parcels handled by the post office.
Mail volume in the fiscal year ended 30 September 2008, declined 4.7% to 202 billion pieces of mail. The postal service reported a US$2.8 billion loss from operations and $7.2 billion in debt at the end of the fiscal year.
Should the postal service get permission from lawmakers to go to a five-day delivery week, it's not clear what effect that could have on e-commerce companies that depend on the service to deliver millions of packages of merchandise to consumers each year.
E-commerce stocks such as Amazon.com, Drugstore.com and eBay seemed largely unaffected by the news of a potential decrease in postal service.
"We work with a number of different carriers to deliver products to our customers," Amazon.com spokesperson Patty Smith told the E-Commerce Times. "We can't speculate about what might or might not happen in the future."
