24/7 Wall St. TV: Postal Layoffs Won’t Help

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 30, 4:44PM EDT · Published Aug 26, 2:07PM EDT

The US Postal Service may be able to drive up the national rate of unemployment all on its own. The USPS will offer 30,000 workers buyouts. It has 650,000 workers, so that number is not as significant as it may seem at first.

The Postal Service expects to lose $7 billion this fiscal year. It believes that the buyouts could save $500 million, which is not nearly enough to solve its financial problems.

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The radical cuts that the Postal Service will need to make are almost certainly going to have to be done in the next year. That could involve cutting service back from six days a week to four or five. It may also mean that mail delivery in rural areas, which are harder for the USPS to serve, could be cut even further.

Mail is becoming an anachronism and that means the USPS, as America has known it, will be gone soon. Many people will not even miss it.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.