A new Village Post Office (VPO) located at the West Hartford Village Store, 5187 Rt. 14 N, West Hartford, VT, will celebrate its official grand opening with a ribbon-cutting ceremony this Wednesday at 10:30 a.m.
U.S. Postal Service Northern New England District Manager Deborah C. Essler will deliver short remarks and cut the ribbon together with store owner John Farrow. The West Hartford VPO is the first in the Northern New England District, which comprises New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine and is one of 58 VPOs now open nationwide.
According to owner Farrow, the store has been in business since 1856, or more than 156 years. For a time during the 19th century, the building housed the town post office.
“I guess you could say it’s like the song goes – everything old is new again,” Farrow says, explaining that he decided to set up a VPO as an outreach to the community. “I thought it would be convenient for our customers to be able to pick up mail, buy their stamps and pick up postal products here.”
The West Hartford Village Store is open Monday through Saturday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Sunday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Farrow says that since the store is open 7 days-a-week, which is later than surrounding towns’ post offices, it is a plus for those who want to buy stamps, get packaging or pick up their Post Office Box mail outside normal postal hours.
District Manager Essler agrees, adding “The Village Post Office is an example of how the Postal Service is changing to better meet America’s needs.”
The new postal center’s official grand opening follows its “soft” opening late last month. Like all VPOs, which are operated by local businesses contracting with the Postal Service, the West Hartford Village Store offers popular postal products and services including Post Office Box service, stamps and flat-rate packaging.
Village Post Offices are part of the Postal Service’s “Approved Postal Provider” network — retail outlets for postal products and services that include Contract Postal Units, Approved Shippers, Stamps on Consignment locations and Community Post Offices. Approved Postal Providers are operated by third parties and complement 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.