You’ve Still Got Mail

We’ve received several calls and e-mails recently from residents who are worried about the future of the U.S. Post Office at Palmer Square. The post office had made some changes, including having the supervisor spend more time at the main post office in West Windsor and dispatching carriers from there.

Residents were worried that the Palmer Square location might be facing a threat of closure, so we were more than a little relieved when we reviewed the United States Postal Service list of post offices that will be studied and did not see Princeton on the list. In fact, there is not a single post office in Mercer County on the list.

The Postal Service will study the 3,700 locations on the list to determine which of those offices to keep open and which to close among its nearly 32,000 locations.

“Our customer’s habits have made it clear they no longer require a physical post office to conduct most of their postal business,” writes a Postal Service official in a note about the study, saying that more and more people are choosing to conduct their postal business online, with their smart phones, or at shopping destinations.

Postal Service officials say given changing patterns of usage, the Postal Service does not need as many retail offices. Instead, the Postal Service will replace many of its locations with what they are calling “Village Post Offices.”

Village Post Offices would be operated by local businesses, like pharmacies, grocery stores and other retailers, and would offer popular postal products and services such as stamps and flat-rate packaging.

This kind of service was very popular with patrons of the former Chicklet Books because they could run errands in the Princeton Shopping Center and take care of their postal needs while not having to hassle with parking headaches.

One Comment

  1. The opening sentence tells the story. No one uses the postal service to communicate.

    Close the system down, save a few forests of junk mail a month, bathe the current staff and retrain them as Jehovah’s Witnesses.

    What was the problem?

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