PMG Suggests: A Six-Pack With Your Stamps?

One of Postmaster General Pat Donahoe’s ideas for saving the U.S. Postal Service from ruin is to allow individual post offices to sell beer and wine and other “innovative products.”

Yes, beer and wine.

In a webinar sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association on Tuesday, the PMG floated this idea as part of a way to help individual brick and mortar post offices compete with other local businesses, if only the USPS could be freed from the “shackles” it faces under current law.

This scheme, of course, would apply to post offices that won’t be closed entirely, another part of the USPS’s wish list.

Predictably, Donahoe reiterated his call on Congress to pass legislation authorizing the USPS to cut mail delivery from six to five days a week because it could save upward of $3 billion a year.

This figure is under dispute and likely wouldn’t yield results for a while.

Donahoe also called on Congress to ease the USPS’s annual $5.5 billion obligation to pre-fund retiree health benefits, something the Obama administration has already proposed doing.

Donahoe also offered more ways to reduce employee headcount above the 110,000 it has cut over the past four years. This is part of the USPS’s plan to cut costs by a total of $20 billion by 2015.

That, he said, could return the USPS to profitability.

Despite inevitable resistance from Congress, not to mention labor unions and others, Donahoe is confident a new postal reform bill will emerge from Congress by the end of Calendar 2011.

Did he forget the last postal reform bill took 11 years to become law?

The PMG undermines his own credibility if he thinks seriously that people are gonna stop by the post office for a six-pack.