Return postal plan to sender

The U.S. Postal Service appears hell-bent on continuing with a thick-headed, Soviet central planning approach toward cutting costs and improving efficiency by providing an increasingly inferior service.

Of course we didn’t conduct expensive studies like the Postal Service did to determine that mail processing centers in Kalispell and Missoula should be closed and relocated to a larger operation in Spokane. Rather, we’ve simply observed that no business has been able to drum up more business by charging more and promising to do less.

But that’s precisely what the Postal Service aims to do, even though its huge financial losses are largely driven by continuing declines in mail volume, with private sector counterparts offering better service at competitive costs.

Ending mail processing in Kalispell at the main Kalispell branch would eliminate 12 positions and save about $575,000 annually. Kalispell local mail would be delivered in two (who knows, maybe three) days rather than overnight.

Considering that nationwide, the Postal Service is looking at closing 487 mail processing centers and laying off as many as 35,000 workers, a collective downgrade in service would set in across the country.

And still, the Postal Service recently announced that it will be raising rates for its more profitable express and priority mail by about 5 percent starting in January.

The Postal Service can claim that the changes are improving efficiency, but diverting local mail to distant processing centers is obviously an exercise in inefficiency.

The formula being applied here is increased consumer costs for less efficiency and slower service, especially compared to UPS and FedEx, and how that will help the Postal Service in the long run is beyond us.

We can’t pretend to know exactly how the Postal Service can stem its losses, but the answer probably lies in a business model that is similar to private sector delivery operations that provide better service at less cost, rather than the other way around.

If you want to let the Postal Service know how you feel about this plan, show up Thursday night at the Red Lion in Kalispell at 7 p.m. to unload. Come to think of it — if moving stuff to Spokane is such a great idea, we wonder why the public meeting wasn’t held at the Red Lion in Spokane!