What does—and doesn’t—arrive in the U.S. Mail

When you publish a weekly community newspaper, the U.S. Mail is your lifeline to the world.

Never mind that our business communications take place primarily via email these days, or that we keep an eye on social media to learn about events at the global and local levels, or that parcels usually arrive courtesy of UPS or FedEx. Or that four land and cellular telephone lines, and walk-in customers, are vitally important.

It’s the U.S. Mail that delivers the majority of our papers to subscribers.

Newspapers do benefit from a substantial savings on outbound postage, especially within the local county where our postal permits are held. (You can view our subscriber numbers each October when we’re required to publish Form 3526 within our pages.)

But it still adds up to a pretty penny—between $100 and $180 per week for each issue. Yes, that’s per week.

Earlier this month that cost took a substantial jump, and our postage costs are now expected to exceed $200 per issue. We get it—costs of living and costs of doing business are rising everywhere.

What hurts is that the Postal Service at the same time gave itself a slower delivery window for first-class mail. Periodicals like ours may not reach you for an extra day. We hope you’ll let us know if that starts to happen. (Please feel free to email us at spur@ thetexasspur.com, which is where we look for business correspodence for all three of our newspapers.)

We hear from subscribers near and far that you like reading the news on the printed page. We do too, and we’re committed to keeping it that way—even though we publish an e-edition weekly and supplement breaking stories with social media posts in between.

In the newspaper office it’s also interesting to see what arrives in the mail each morning. We’re lucky that our mail is boxed early on weekdays and on Saturdays here in Spur. We applaud our USPS crews here at home, and at all the regional offices that deliver the news!

It’s a good day when the P.O. Box is full to overflowing with checks, of course.

(Want to know which days are the slimmest for invoice payments arriving? Tuesdays!)

It’s also a welcome surprise when honest-to-goodness handwritten paper letters arrive. We get a goodly number of those from former residents who have moved away and enjoy receiving meaty news from back home. We get notes penned in the margins of subscription renewal cards, too. We get suggestions for stories to cover.

We sometimes get letters to the editor. And we generally run them (sometimes edited for length) if they carry a legitimate sender name and address.

From time to time we get one like the recent anonymous missive that started out, “Our town is dying!” No name means it goes straight to File 13.

We get lots of change-of-address labels from the post office. If you move, do remember to send us your new mailing info; your newspaper may get forwarded—eventually—but it’s not unusual for us to receive a postal COA form that’s three months old.

What really makes our day? When we open an envelope with a news clipping and a note: “Wow! Thank y’all for all you do!”

In case you’re wondering, we don’t run those compliments as letters to the editor—instead, we promptly tack them up on the mailroom bulletin board for all the newspaper crew to see as they’re labeling and tying those bundles for another week’s issue.

For that, we thank the U.S. mail—both going and coming.