The Postal Service is planning to stop collecting the mail at the end of the day at most of the country’s post offices. Rather than being processed overnight, the mail will sit in the back of the post office, waiting for collection the next morning, when the day’s mail is dropped off.
Under the current system, mail is transported early each morning from processing centers to 31,000 post offices, where it’s distributed to PO Boxes and sent out for delivery by letter carriers. At the end of the day, in the late afternoon and early evening, the process is reversed — the outgoing mail is collected from post offices and transported to the processing centers, where it’s processed overnight for dispatch the next day.
