See, they're security blankets.
"If you’ve been a member of a small community, you know that often times your identity is tied up within your post office. You may not have a police force but you do have your post office.”
Uh-huh.
To folks like Ms. Bucy, "closing" apparently means the end of deliveries. Evidently this woman is out of her mind:
Herbster is one of 41 post offices on the chopping block in Wisconsin. Town Supervisor Jane Bucy thinks closing rural branches could mean the end to many small towns.
“Oh, it’s the life of the community. We get a lot of elderly people here who are dependent upon it for medicines and things. They don’t get around very easily. Packages. I mean, it’s just the life of the community.”
Well, sure. Close the Post Office and 1) the town ceases to have an "identity" and nothing will be delivered to anyone ever again.
I hailed the closure of small inefficient post offices, thinking: “It’s about time!” Living in the rural countryside for a few decades now and having delivered to a plethora of tiny post offices, it has always amazed me that the USPS - ever mired in red numbers - had not moved to eliminate more of these.
ReplyDeleteSome are open a mere two hours a day and are located a handful of miles from others similarly staffed. Those that do operate ‘full business hours’ still operate under the ‘banking hours’ hours of an earlier time - as they still close religiously for lunch each day! What modern business does that anymore?
There may have been some justification for this in the horse and buggy days when most people had to walk to them. But today foot traffic is rare even in the rural countryside – everyone drives to the PO! The USPS is never going to get out of the red until it realizes, or is forced to acknowledge, that it is a business, not a subsidized monopoly.