The United States Postal Service announced today that it has posted a nearly $4 billion loss for the fiscal year 2009. As bad as that may seem, it is only half of what it is expecting to lose in the fiscal year 2010.

Chief Financial Officer for the Post Office had this to say in a statement, “Our 2009 fiscal year proved to be one of the most challenging in the history of the Postal Service. The deep economic recession, and to a lesser extent, the ongoing migration of mail to electronic alternatives, significantly affect all mail products, creating a large imbalance between revenues and costs.”

The loss is a record for the service and comes even after $6 billion in cost cutting measures were taken. It also had a $4 billion reduction in health benefits payments to retired postal workers. It also cut 40,000 jobs across the country in 2009.

The problems came from the fall in total mail volume. It fell nearly 13%; which translates to shipping 25 billion fewer pieces of mail this year versus last year.

The Postal Service has to do something to be more efficient. At what point in time can it stop blaming people using email and other electronic forms of media for its falling revenues? The postal service has been losing money for years now and it really hasn’t done much except for the past year when it cut 40,000 jobs and stopped paying on retiree health benefits. With as much money as it is losing, there has to be something else that it can do to help itself.

Then again, most things that are run by the government are really good at being inefficient and hemorrhaging money. I suppose when you take that into consideration then seeing how much money that the postal service is losing, it isn’t too much of a surprise.

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