TWIN FALLS - Consolidation couldn't help the U.S. Postal Service in its battle with snow, rain, heat and gloom of night.

After about a year of internal review, the postal service has decided to keep its area-mail processing center in Twin Falls instead of combining it with the center in Boise.

"This was a careful review," Lloyd Wilkinson, Spokane district manager for the postal service, said Monday. "The conclusion is that there will be no significant changes made at this time."

Denver-based spokeswoman Teresa Rudkin said the center in Boise could have handled the additional volume of mail. And transportation wasn't a problem except in one area, she said.

By consolidating services in Boise, she said, the postal service would not have been able to guarantee overnight service in the Wood River Valley.

"If we made the change, we didn't think we'd be able to keep the great service we provide," she said.

"I'm sure it would have been unacceptable to them," Rudkin said of postal customers in the Wood River Valley. "We weren't going to go there."

And that's good news to Kathleen Krekow at Iconoclast Books in Ketchum.

"If we lost our overnight service, it would be horrendous for us," she said. "There are important times when we really need overnight service - both to get things in and to get things out."

Internet sales have become a bigger part of the used-book store's business, Krekow said. And Iconoclast typically mails those books.

Many of those customers live in the valley part of the year and buy books year-round.

"They order from us all the time when they are not in town, and oftentimes they want second-day delivery," Krekow said.