Reports: Postal Service Will Move To Halt Saturday Mail

The move has been long anticipated. The Postal Service continues to lose billions of dollars a year and is looking for ways to cut costs. Eliminating Saturday delivery of first-class mail (but not packages) might save it about $2 billion annually.

The U.S. Postal Service, which has been preparing the public for this news for a couple years now, will announce this morning that it plans to halt Saturday delivery of first-class mail this summer, according to reports from The Associated Press and CBS News.

USPS, which lost $16 billion last year, thinks the move will save it about $2 billion annually, CBS says. The network adds that:

"The plan to shrink delivery from six days a week to five would only affect first-class mail, while packages, mail-order medicines, priority and express mail would still get delivered on Saturdays."

It's still not clear, though, how the Postal Service will do this if Congress doesn't say it's OK. According to CBS, "lawyers for the Postal Service think that they have figured out a way around [that]."

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.