A customer leaves the US Post Office on Shallowford Road today.The Shallowford Road Post Office will shift all its sorting and distribution operations to Atlanta and Nashville, likely slowing first-class mail delivery times in the Chattanooga area.
The location may continue to operate as a post office, but most of the 110 local United States Postal Service jobs will leave the area. First-class mail delivery will likely slow from a one- to three-day schedule to two- to three-day delivery.
The Postal Service has been hemorrhaging money as first-class mail use has plummeted while people shift their correspondence online, Post Office representatives said when starting to study the site for closure. The shift is expected to save the federally-mandated but not federally-funded organization $2 million annually.
The closure is one of as many as 252 closures being eyed across the country. The Postal Service wants to cut 220,000 jobs from its nearly 560,000-strong work force by 2015.
Representatives from the Postal Service were not immediately available for comment.
For more information, read tomorrow's Times Free Press.