But now, not so much. (Thanks to Jonathan Coppage)
Giant online retailer Amazon.com Inc. is turning up the heat on rivals this holiday season and beyond under a new deal with the U.S. Postal Service for delivering packages on Sundays.
Starting this week, the postal service will bring Amazon packages on Sundays to shoppers’ doors in the Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas at no extra charge. Next year, it plans to roll out year-round Sunday delivery to Dallas, New Orleans, Phoenix and other cities.
Getting packages on Sundays normally is expensive for customers. United Parcel Service Inc. doesn’t deliver on Sundays, according to a spokeswoman. And FedEx Corp. said Sunday “is not a regular delivery day,” though limited options are available.
The deal could be a boon for the postal service, which has been struggling with mounting financial losses and has been pushing to limit general letter mail delivery to five days a week.
Spokeswoman Sue Brennan said that letter mail volume is declining “so extremely,” yet package volume is “increasing in double-digit percentages.”
The postal service’s Sunday package delivery business has been very small, but the arrangement with Amazon for two of the retailer’s larger markets, Los Angeles and New York, should boost work considerably.
Old Life 
What are you implying? Do you think those Applebee’s servers are going to witness to themselves on Sunday?
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My local Applebee’s recently had a protest outside its doors apparently over a mother getting booted for breastfeeding. Many young women with babies and kids. It wasn’t a Sunday though, so I can’t be sure if the protest was doubling as a revival meetin’
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The sabbath was made for man. I grew up in Pennsylvania and “Blue Laws” that closed most commerce down on Sundays. It was a good thing, as I recall. life slowed down, retail people had the day with their families.
Darryl the historian of course knows that in early America, there was a big fight about closing down the post offices–for many people, the only time they came to town was to go to church, and that’s when they’d pick up their mail.
The commercial republic won.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-post-office-returns-to-sundays-a-century-later/
The stern Calvinists believed in a strict Sabbath, one whose rest from work would not be wasted on wickedness or distraction. Businessmen fought them off, however, as even the early 19th century life often held up as a model of agrarian patience felt a compulsion to not miss a single day’s time in conducting its commercial affairs. The merchants found an ally in “some evangelical ministers, particularly Baptists,” who had grown during the Second Great Awakening, “and among secular laymen who saw the sabbatarian drive as a power grab by high-status, eastern churchmen.” Fischer relates that “the conflict became further inflamed with the increasing immigration of Catholics, many of whom celebrated ‘Continental’ Sundays which included all sorts of secular pleasures – picnics, even beer halls – after (or instead of) church.” So community and church competed for the attention of their citizens.
Business interests and low-churchers kept America’s latter-day Puritans at bay throughout the 19th century, and men could continue to congregate in the mid-afternoon, even if (especially if) no mail was coming. Change was in the air, however, by the turn of the century, even if it had yet to fully reach Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley. The progressive era revived and revitalized American moralism, with voluntary associations like the Anti-Saloon League and the Lord’s Day Association advocating their own legislative solutions to American dissolution. Finally the Puritan’s heirs were able to make an alliance of their own, this time with the growing labor movement.
Both motivated by reaction to the upheavals and demands of industrializing America, the union leader seized on the church crusader’s Sabbath as part of his effort to carve out at least one day of rest from the factories’ seven-day work week. Technological changes like the telegraph and the telephone kept business humming without physical deliveries, easing the mercantile opposition. In 1912, Congress passed a rider on an appropriations bill banning post offices from conducting normal business on Sundays.
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