Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

Despite the fact that the U.S. Postal Service lost almost $5 billion in fiscal year 2013, Postal Regulatory Commission Chairman Ruth Goldway spent nearly $40,000 on travel, The Washington Free Beacon reports.

Goldway and the PRC office have consistently defended her travel, telling The Washington Post in a statement that the chairman "attends only those [conferences and meetings] that are beneficial to the Commission and the Postal Service in terms of sharing information about activities in the U.S."

Current Chairman of the Senate for Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Senator Tom Carper, recently shared his views with Republic 3.0 on keeping the U.S. Postal Service viable in the 21st Century.

While we agree with Senator Carper that Congress needs to act during the lame-duck session following the November elections, we are also adamant to make sure the reform is meaningful for mailers, rather than making the current situation worse.

We disagree with his assumptions related to pricing.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe made a statement this week demonstrating that postal executives’ views about weekend delivery of packages have changed significantly in the past four years. "The future will be a seven-day package world and a five-day mail world," a USA Today article quoted Donahoe as saying.

In recent months, weekend delivery of parcels has gone from obligation to opportunity. The Postal Service is delivering Amazon packages in a growing number of urban markets. In San Francisco, it is testing same-day, seven-days-a-week delivery for multiple retailers and today added early-morning grocery deliveries to its test offerings in that city.

The Postal Service’s proposed market test of same-day grocery deliveries, apparently in partnership with Amazon, would require even more TLC on the part of USPS’s carrier force than normal deliveries, the agency revealed this week in filings with the Postal Regulatory Commission.

"All Customized Delivery items will be transported directly to a customer’s door and will be delivered [between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m.] without disturbing the recipient," USPS revealed to the PRC.

To avoid theft of the early-morning deliveries, such "special delivery instructions" could conceivably include placing the special grocery-filled totes at back doors, in hallways, into parked cars, or even...

According to U.S Postal Service spokesman Dave Partenheimer, the Governors of the U.S. Postal Service have decided not to seek a price change for mail and shipping products and services in January because of the uncertainty regarding the exigent price increase.

As technology advances, learn to blend physical marketing messages with digital channels to guarantee campaigns are more effective.

A rate hike, a decrease, an extension of the temporary "exigent" increase, and an even an increase and decrease a few months apart are all plausible 2015 scenarios for First Class, Standard, and Periodicals mailers. That uncertainty is a far cry from the past few years, when "market-dominant" postal rates inched up each January based on the rate of inflation.

The three-judge panel considering an appeal of the exigency case seems unlikely either to eliminate the rate hike or to make it permanent, according to Stephen Kearney, executive director of the Alliance for Nonprofit Mailers.

The U.S. Postal Service recently reported having 616,025 active employees, just 362 fewer than a year ago. The number of full-timers actually inched up by 1,464, to 467,844. That’s a far cry from the previous six years, when the annual workforce reductions ranged from 13,000 to nearly 53,000.

Downsizing of the postal workforce seems likely to resume soon, however. USPS is moving forward with a plan to close about 80 processing centers in the next few months, which could lead to a reduction of 15,000 jobs. A recent effort to block the plan in Congress has apparently fizzled out.

This week, Structural Graphics is featuring a pop-up invitation that it developed to invite businesses to an event to learn more about the cost and service advantages of using UPS over other quick-ship services.

Even as some lawmakers push to limit Postal Service cost-cutting measures, the agency still plans to reduce its workforce by up to 15,000 employees and close up to 82 processing centers.

The agency estimates that it could save $750 million annually from the planned cuts, and said it had already saved $865 million from closing 141 mail processing facilities in 2012 and 2013.

The Postal Service believes the best way to position the agency for the future is through comprehensive reform legislation, according to spokeswoman Patricia Licata, but will continue to cut costs where it can.