Malone, Washington (CNN) -- The post office in the tiny Washington town of Malone sells beer and cigarettes. Live worms for fishing, too. The boxes for fixed-rate shipping are wedged between racks of beef jerky and $6.99 sunglasses.

The Malone location is what the U.S. Postal Service has dubbed a "village" post office. It's inside Red's Hop N' Market, the town mini-mart where locals like to buy lottery tickets and a case of beer before the weekend.

It's the only village post office in the country, but soon a similar hybrid may be coming to a town near you.

As the Postal Service buckles under a $9 billion debt, the mail agency has looked for ways to slash operating costs.

"The primary thing we look at is how much revenue they (post offices) generate (and) has that revenue been going down," said Ernie Swanson, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service in Seattle.

"(At) a lot of these offices, there's a postmaster and no other employee. So do they have an hour or two of work a day, and we are paying them for eight hours?"

Some 3,700 post offices may soon face being turned into village post offices, according to the Postal Service. Last week, Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe testified at a Senate hearing that as many as 220,000 post office employees could lose their jobs in the restructuring.

Postmaster general's warning to Congress

For Malone -- the test ground for the first village post office -- having mail service quite literally put the town on the map.

Search for Malone on Google Maps, and the only landmark that comes up for the entire town is the original, now closed, post office.

Cheryl Kim and her husband, Johnny, own the Red's Hop N' Market, where the village post office is located.

When the couple received a letter last year from the Postal Service inquiring whether they would incorporate the post office into their store, Cheryl Kim said they were confused.

iReport —
The tenth anniversary of 9/11 was a relatively quiet one, from what I saw. Starting off at St. Paul's Chapel, in lower Manhattan, I met up with my friend and fellow photographer Brenna around 11am. We saw a group of protestors holding signs and wearing T-shirts that said "The Bush Regime Engineered 9-11" and "9/11 Was An Inside Job". They were standing across the street from the Chapel, where visitors came to tie a ribbon and pay their respects to the victims of 9/11. The entire area around City Hall and Ground Zero was cordoned off and under heavy security. Apart from some heated exchanges, the inside-jobbers were allowed to stage their protest.



After St. Paul's Chapel, we visited the Madina Masjid, a mosque in the East Village, which is overseen by Imam Hafiz Choudhury. Imam Choudhury has been at the Masjid for thirty-five years. He and his fourteen-year-old son Ahsan showed us around. My colleague Brenna, an Irish-American woman, was allowed access to all areas of the mosque, and Imam Choudhury took the time to patiently explain some prayer rituals to her, including where the women sit during prayer (in the back, behind a curtain). I asked if the Masjid had faced any trouble in the neighborhood, and Imam Choudhury waved away my concerns, saying that they never had any problems as a mosque in the East Village of New York City. His friendliness and openness probably had a lot to do with the mosque's peaceful relationship with its neighbours. Outside the Masjid, seventeen-year-old Shumon was selling perfumes and other Muslim knicknacks from a sidewalk table -- a business that he inherited from his grandfather. Shumon arrived in the US one and half years ago, from Sylhet, Bangladesh. His English is rapidly improving, and he is in school taking extra lessons. We were welcomed warmly by everyone at the mosque, and spoke to our hosts at length. We thanked everyone for their time, and moved on to our next event, the ICP.