Eric Zorn's research of Chicago Tribune archives found that ending Saturday deliver was brought up previously in 1962, 1975, 1977, 1981, 1987, 1992, 2001 and 2009.

You might expect that McHenry County Blog would look at things from a political viewpoint.

Politicians love to have third class mail delivered on the Monday before the election. Anna May Miller must have thought she won the lottery when that happened to her county board mailing in Algonquin.

Why?

It results in their getting the message to constituents as close as to the election as possible…unless one has people standing in front of polling places.

If a campaign could take its last mailing to the post office on the Saturday before the election, Monday delivery could be expected. That’s because for the last two or so weeks of a campaign, political mail, properly red tagged, is treated like first class mail.

Call it a citizenship subsidy.

Or you could think of a more pejorative description, I guess.

The problem is that virtually all bulk mail specialists work from Monday through Friday. It’s one of the perks of the job.

Now, the post office is talking about no deliveries on Saturday.

That means campaign mail posted on Friday will be delivered on Monday in most instances, instead of Saturday.

This past year the only way to make sure your message got delivered on Monday was to put an insert in the Northwest Herald. (Any of you remember when Mark Sweetwood went ballistic when a political insert was delivered in the Cary area under his reign? He vowed it would never be done again. Current management seems to have reversed that revenue-deriving practice.)

If the post office ends Saturday delivery, there will be competition for the NW Herald. I suspect it will be more expensive than the price to insert, but mail certainly would reach more of the target audience.
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In Eric Zorn’s column above, he notes that twice a day delivery ended in 1950.  I’m old enough to remember the postman coming twice a day to our home at 212 South Aurora Street in Easton, Maryland.  I’m not old enough to remember when the seven-day delivery schedule ended in 1912.