The United States Postal Service may close thousands of post office locations that are losing money, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Starting March, the USPS plans to shut down up to 2,000 post offices, on top of the 500 or so it closed at the end of last year, as the agency faces a mountain of red ink.

The agency said it list a record $8.5-billion last year.

Moreover, the USPS will request Congress to change a law so that it can shut down another 16,000 of the least profitable post offices (under present laws, a post office cannot be shut down just because it is losing money).

There are about 32,000 post offices remaining in the country – and they are virtually all liable to disappear in the near-future, given the rising costs of postage and the increased usage of the internet for personal and business correspondence.

The delivery of first-class mail peaked in 2006.