Don’t Blame ‘Overpaid Postal Workers' for Rising Periodicals Costs

The U.S. Postal Service’s cost to deliver a magazine or newspaper has been rising twice as fast as inflation for more than two decades, but don’t blame employee pay levels. The real culprit is declining productivity, the Postal Service’s own numbers indicate.

“The tendency of Periodicals costs to increase much faster than inflation...has continued with few interruptions since FY1986,” postal expert Halstein Stralberg wrote recently. As a result, the Postal Service has repeatedly hit the Periodicals class with rate increases that exceed both inflation and those for most other classes, as it is trying to do again in the