EXLINE, IA – The Exline Old Country Store, located at 102 W Main St., will host a brief grand opening ceremony as Iowa’s first Village Post Office (VPO) on November 15 at 1 p.m. The Exline VPO will compliment the Exline Post Office, which will continue to operate with reduced retail window service hours Monday thru Friday.

The U.S. Postal Service introduced the VPO model as an expanded retail location for postal products and services, especially in rural communities. VPOs are operated by local businesses contracting with the Postal Service, and offer a range of popular postal products and services including stamps and flat-rate packaging. There are currently 64 VPOs operating nationwide.

VPOs provide a range of services that could include a collection box, accepting mail, selling Forever stamps, offering Priority Mail Flat Rate products with stamps for postage and PO Box services.

The Old Country Store's 4,000 square feet are home to antiques, groceries, snacks, books and crafts. The store’s website boasts that customers can rest by the pot-belly stove or relax during warm weather on one of the many wooden rocking chairs on the front porch.

The Exline Village Post Office will be open Mon – Sat from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

“The location at the Exline Old Country Store will provide postal customers time-saving convenience and will continue to be an important example of how the Postal Service is changing to better meet America’s needs,” said Jim Herrmann, manager of the Postal Service’s Des Moines-based Hawkeye District.

Herrmann will join Old Country Store Manager Penny Sharp to officially open the new Exline Village Post Office.

The new Exline Village Post Offices will be part of the agency’s Approved Postal Provider network, which are operated by third parties and compliment the Postal Service’s own network by offering customers expanded retail access to postal products and services at convenient hours and locations.

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A self-supporting government enterprise, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation — 151 million residences, businesses and Post Office™ Boxes. The Postal Service™ receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. With 32,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, usps.com®, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $65 billion and delivers nearly 40 percent of the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 35th in the 2011 Fortune 500. In 2011, Oxford Strategic Consulting ranked the U.S. Postal Service number one in overall service performance of the posts in the top 20 wealthiest nations in the world. Black Enterprise and Hispanic Business magazines ranked the Postal Service as a leader in workforce diversity. The Postal Service has been named the Most Trusted Government Agency for six years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute.