Tagged: rural post offices

Every week, KBIA's Health & Wealth Desk curates the week's most interesting (or so we think) articles and reports on rural health, wealth and society issues. 

Rural post offices in crisis

Hartsburg is home to one of the 13,000 rural post offices across the country that are reducing business hours in response to a major drop in revenue for the United States Postal Service.

Thirty Hartsburg residents met Wednesday to review the decision to keep the town’s post office open for only four hours on weekdays.

To the Hartsburg residents who gathered to discuss the future of the town’s postal service, the post office provides more than their mail—it gives the town an identity.

Now that Thanksgiving has passed, many people have begun to deck the halls, gorge on delectable dishes, and send out greeting cards. Well, that last one might become trickier for some rural residents soon. That’s because the United States Postal Service is moving ahead to reduce the hours of thousands of post offices across the country.  Jennifer Davidson has this report from a rural Ozarks community.

A tiny post office sits in Pomona, Mo. It’s a very small, white plaster concrete building with a flagpole to the side.

Pomona is in a rural area in south central Missouri.  This is one of the many post offices across the United States in an effort to save money by the US Postal Service.

“I think all of the smaller offices in this area—they’re all going to that, because, you know, there’s a lot of lag time,” says Anna Carnefix, the postmaster relief for the Pomona office.