RALEIGH -- For decades, the State University Station just off Hillsborough Street has served as the main post office for students and employees of N.C. State University and residents of the leafy older neighborhoods nearby.
No more. Today is the last day for picking up mail at rented boxes there and, in a couple of weeks, the station will shut down entirely.
It's a victim of changing times. The U.S. Postal Service lost $8.5 billion in the most recent fiscal year as people increasingly turned to the Internet to pay their bills and communicate, and as competition from the likes of FedEx and UPS for parcel service grew stronger.
Even by postal service standards, business had fallen off sharply at the university station. Revenue had fallen by more than half in the past four years, and the number of retail transactions dropped by 61 percent, said Carl Walton, spokesman for the Greensboro District.
The lone worker who staffs the building will move to another station.
The postal service will save at least $35,000 in rent and utilities by shutting the office, Walton said. Given the drop in business there, it made no sense to keep it open, he said, particularly with another branch so close by, across Oberlin Road from Cameron Village shopping center.
"It was an opportunity for us to save some money, which is something we have to do," Walton said. "It's incumbent on us as a business to look at every single operation, particularly if it's not supported by retail transactions and revenue."
Not only had retail sales fallen sharply. Post office box rentals, too, had dropped off. Fewer than 200 of the station's 800 boxes were being rented, he said.
Postal officials aren't sure exactly why business has dwindled so much. Part of the problem, Walton said, could be that university students are among the heaviest users of the digital alternatives to mail - e-mail, texting and social media - that have cut into the postal service's core business.
Still, it's unusual for a post office to close. The postal service wants to shut hundreds of stations across the country to save money, but members of Congress, local officials and the postal unions have made that difficult.
In the Greensboro postal district, which covers Raleigh and most of the northern half of the state, only one post office, in Currituck, closed this year. Another station, in Winston-Salem, was scheduled to close this week, but politicians had the move delayed until at least next summer.
The rented boxes at the State University Station will be transferred to the Cameron Village post office, and box holders won't have to change their addresses in any way, Walton said. A representative of the Raleigh postmaster will be on hand Monday to help box holders get oriented to the new setup.
It won't be the same, of course, said Raymond Murray, 90, a retired NCSU nuclear engineering professor who picked up his mail there for the last time Thursday morning.
Murray has rented a box at the station for about 60 years, he said, ever since the federal government made him get one for security reasons when he was working on a classified program to design an atomic reactor for the Army.
Busy past
Decades ago, he said, the station was a bustling place, thick with students, faculty, university staff and Hillsborough Street merchants.
Murray lives at the Springmoor retirement community in North Raleigh now and could get all his mail there. But he is a man of routines, and every Tuesday and Thursday, he drives several miles to pick up his mail.
He is so used to it, in fact, that he plans to continue driving in to the Cameron Village station.
It's not just young whippersnappers and their endless texting that are eroding the post office's place in the world; Murray said he relies on e-mail now, and sometimes buys things online.
"I use the computer more than the telephone now," he said. "I'm sorry about the station closing, but that's how progress works.
