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Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Ammon convenience store offer post office services


Jarom Christensen at Hitt-the-Road, now a U.S. Postal Service contractor.
When you consider that Swan Valley and Irwin each have their own post offices but Ammon, a city of more than 14,500 doesn’t, it sort of makes you wonder how these decisions are made.

The good news, however, is that the Hitt-the-Road convenience store at the northeast corner of Sunnyside and Hitt roads is now an official U.S. Postal Service station where you can mail all your Christmas cards and holiday parcels. This fills a hole left by the closing of CD World, which had a very busy postal station.

In fact, once Jarom Christensen, who owns the store, learned he would getting the business he hired Rachel Barr and Anthony Chabis, the two people who used to take care of the USPS business at CD World. “They know exactly what they’re doing, so we were able to hit the ground running,” he said.

Christensen, whose company is called Voyager Enterprises, said the Postal Service approached him and other businesses in the area in 2014 after CD World closed. He had to submit his financials and undergo a security check, and the entire process took about nine months.

“We worked really hard to get it,” Christensen said. “I think we’re going to do a lot of volume here. They told us that CD World had the highest volume of any contractor in Utah or Idaho.”

The advantages to having a post office in the store are obvious. Convenience stores’ business depends not on gas sales but the sales of soda and snacks. If people are coming in to mail a letter or package, there’s a pretty good chance they might want a Slim Jim or a Pepsi.

“Everything here is an impulse purchase,” Christensen said.