The Postal Service accelerates its demise.

The United States Postal Service, like many service organizations facing reduced demand in a downturn, is trying to cut costs.

Like the masses of unimaginative service businesses, their “best idea” for cost reductions is to reduce service levels. In this case, they’re considering shifting to a 5-day delivery service from the current 6-day operation, eliminating Saturday deliveries.

It’s a bad idea.

Three major service components differentiate USPS from its primary competitors, UPS and FedEx:

They’re inexpensive. Though it now known as “snail mail”, USPS is very reliable, given what are usually substantial price differences between its offering and that of the parcel carriers.

They serve outlying areas. UPS and FedEx place enormous charges on deliveries beyond their core service areas, because they lose money delivering to places without density of stops.

They deliver Saturdays. Before the recession forced the elimination of shifts, an increasing number businesses were conducting Saturday operations. With the growth of ecommerce, Saturday is looked on by many companies as needed fulfillment day.

By eliminating Saturday deliveries, USPS eliminates a key reason businesses use them. Add in that they’re considering reducing service to rural areas and increasing the prices on parcel sized shipments, and they may actually be in the process of killing all three of their service differentiators at once.

It has been suggested that the USPS should be run more like a standalone business. Some go so far as to say it should be privatized. While that idea may or may not have merit, changing core elements of the service to replicate their closest competitors – ones much more nimble and far less bureaucratic in decision making than they are – is exactly the wrong sort of service model change.