Letters to the Editor

We welcome your opinions and letters — with name and address. We will edit when necessary. Include your name, address and phone number for verification. Mail them to Bay Weekly, P.O. Box 358, Deale, MD 20751 • E-mail them to [email protected]. or submit your letters on line, click here

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The High Cost of the USPS

Dear Bay Weekly:
Ron and I enjoy Bay Weekly (formerly New Bay Times) more than I can express. We were one of your first subscribers. When you began your venture to be a new, environmentally focused local paper, we signed up for a lifetime subscription. Our belief and your hard work made the fledgling newspaper a great success!

Now, for the first time, Bay Weekly arrived in an envelope with postage of $1.06 to cover the mailing. It’s a free newspaper, but I gather distribution has had to change. Until yesterday, we received our home delivery without thinking twice about the cost for delivering it to our home

We’re ‘cancelling’ our subscription to ease up on your mailing costs. But that doesn’t mean we won’t still get the paper; Ron and I will pick up our copy from a local distributor.

Thank you. We’ve gotten more than a lifetime’s worth of pleasure from reading Bay Weekly. We wish you and your staff continued success.

—Ginny and Ron Casterline, Upper Marlboro

Editor’s note: Readers and friends the Casterlines comment on a change we’ve made reluctantly this spring.

The lion’s share of the 17,500 papers we print each week are circulated by controlled delivery, meaning you pick up your paper by choice at one of the 500-plus stops and shops that allow us to place Bay Weekly on their premises.

Two hundred, however, have gone out by mail to paid subscribers. After 12 years of increasingly slow delivery, we’ve cancelled our bulk mail permit and been forced to mail first-class.

Taking this stand against the U.S. Postal Service is expensive and time consuming, but that’s the cost to make sure that our paying subscribers like the Casterlines receive their papers within days rather than weeks. We wish there were an easier and more cost-effective way, but we have found no such help from the Postal Service.