I stop by my local post office several times a week to retrieve mail from Post Office Box 7. (Someone asked recently how I managed to get POB 7. I asked for it and it was available.) The staff of the Ruston Post Office have always been helpful and friendly.

A couple of weeks ago my box held a bright yellow mailer from the United States Postal Service which advertised “eBay Day at the Ruston Post Office”. eBay Day was last week. From 10am to 1pm, customers learned the ins and outs of eBay and learned about “Quick, Easy, Convenient(tm)” online shipping options offered by the US Post Service. The first 100 participants received a coupon for three free listing fees on eBay.

Ruston has a really nice post office. And it’s always busy. It seems surprisingly so for a town our size. Folks gather and chat a bit while sorting their mail.

I usually sort Wheatworks’ mail before I leave the post office. I toss the junk mail into the convenient waste receptacles. I kept the eBay Day flyer because it struck me as an unusual effort by a government-related business to partner with a public corporation. (Of course, in light of the U.S. Government’s “investments” in insurance companies and banks lately, this shouldn’t seem odd.)

So why is the United States Post Office partnering with eBay?

Here’s what seems to be happening. The United State Postal Service is hurting like so many other businesses. According to an article available on the KSLA web site, the “Postal Service Looks to Cut 40,000 Jobs In First Layoff In History“.

The U.S. Postal Services has “lost 2 billion dollars”. It employs 685,000 people. According to the article by Jonathan McCall, Lavell Pepper with the post office in Shreveport, LA reports, “the preliminary numbers (40,000) look like it’s not going to be enough and we may have to do something else.”

If you’re interested in the financial report for the United States Postal Service, it’s available on their web site at: http://www.usps.com/history/anrpt07/highlights.htm

I may be reading those numbers incorrectly, but I think the $2 Billion dollar loss mentioned in the KSLA article is a bit low. The Net Loss for 2007 as reported by the USPS is more than $5 billion.

Perhaps that extra $3 Billion loss is why laying off 40,000 employees may not be enough to save the United States Postal Service.

However, with the way the U.S. Government has thrown money at private companies lately, it should not be too hard for the USPS to ask Uncle Sam for a few more billion. In 2007, taxpayers tossed $3 billion to the United States Postal Service as “capital contributions of U.S. government.”