COLORADO CITY — It’s 10 a.m. on a stuffy August morning and Roxie Frank is about to make what’s become a routine trip for residents of this Colorado town: Drive 60 miles to pick up her mail at the post office in Pueblo.
The hourlong trip is the latest inconvenience for the roughly 2,500 residents of Colorado City, where for decades the local post office was attached to other businesses. The arrangement worked fairly well before the pandemic. But in recent months two business owners quit, one after the other, citing lack of supplies, training and support from the U.S. Postal Service.
Residents were notified in August that their closest mail stop would be shut down and that they’d need to commute to Pueblo to check their P.O. boxes.
“Sorry for the inconvenience,” a handwritten sign posted in the window of the former post office said.