Say goodbye to the Magnolia Park Post Office in Burbank. Residents and business owners have gathered signatures in an attempt to keep it open, but it will officially be closing at the end of the year and moving to a new location: 2140 N. Hollywood Way. The Glenoaks Station Post Office may be closing up shop, too. Post offices all over the country have been shutting down as a result of online shopping and emailing, so it’s not really a surprise to see it happen to the Burbank post offices.

U.S. Postal Service spokesman, Richard Maher, says the postal service is registering a loss of nearly $7 billion this fiscal year, despite hiking the price of stamps by 2 cents in May and removing collection boxes. About 10% of its nearly 33,000 nationwide facilities face closure, reports the Burbank Leader. The independent Postal Regulatory Commission last month posted a 12-page list of large post offices and connected satellites facing the ax. There may be a steep decline in post office activity, but residents are still trying to keep them open.

“Nobody wants their post office gone,” Maher said. “And this sort of shows how important post offices and stations are to communities.”

The U.S. Postal Service has made a number of cuts this summer to save costs, including closing down post offices and retail stations. They announced earlier this week that 413 retail stations and branches remain under consideration for possible consolidation. With nearly 37,000 post offices, stations, and branches, the U.S. Postal Service has the largest retail network in the United States.

In a recent press release, the USPS listed all the ways they’ve been cutting costs due to the decline in mail volume:

To offset the current extremely difficult financial position, the Postal Service has successfully removed more than $6 billion in cost in 2009, including:

• Cutting more than 100 million work hours, the equivalent of 57,000 positions;
• Closing six district administrative offices;
• Adjusting carrier routes to reflect diminished volume and eliminating nearly 12,000 carrier routes;
• Instituting a nationwide hiring freeze;
• Reducing authorized staffing levels at national and regional offices by 15 percent;
• Selling unused and under-utilized postal facilities;
• Adjusting Post Office hours to better reflect customer use;
• Consolidating mail processing operations;
• Halting construction of new postal facilities; and
• Freezing salaries of all Postal Service officers and executives.

“Additional efficiency initiatives are continuing,” the press release states. “Reducing over-capacity in retail and delivery operations is a good business move. Every effort will be made to maintain and improve customer access to postal services.”

I think the reality is we’ll no longer have these services at all. The art of letter writing is practically dead (I’m talking about physical, tangible letters), online shopping is booming, and the recession is still killing us. It might be time to say goodbye. Thanks, Post Office. You’ve had a good run. It’s not you, it’s us.

Photo Courtesy of Yelp.com

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