Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

President Obama renewed his longstanding call to overhaul the U.S. Postal Service in his fiscal 2015 budget, saying the agency must be reformed to ensure its future viability.

Obama recommended restructuring the Postal Service’s requirement to prefund the health care of retirees. His plan would defer the fixed payments due in 2014, and part of the payments due in the two years after that.

Obama also would allow the Postal Service to eliminate Saturday mail delivery immediately, whereas the Senate bill would delay the switch to five-day delivery until 2017. USPS officials have said the schedule change would save almost $2

The USPS is broken, and there are so many selfish motives permeating the committee rooms that have been tasked with devising a going-forward blueprint. Although the last postal reform effort is only seven years old, it already seems antiquated and unsustainable (the understatement of the century). And the odds of Congress enacting an encore during 2014 are not favorable.

This week, the Structural Graphics team, shows a sound module magazine insert that promotes the complete Star Wars saga on Cinemax using the iconic sound of Luke's father to deliver an earful.

The U.S. Postal Service doesn’t know whether the Flats Sequencing System (FSS) is reducing its costs and doesn’t seem to be trying to find out.

Both postal officials and mailers have been hoping for several years that FSS would yield substantial decreases in the cost of handling and delivering flat mail.

But only about 30 percent of flat mail is being processed on the football-field-sized machines, which are failing to live up to expectations and have led to a legal dispute between USPS and the company that built the machines.

It was recently proposed in a paper from the Office of Inspector General of the USPS for the Postal Service to begin offering "non-bank financial services to help the financially underserved," which would include substitutes for high interest payday loans as well as, prepaid cards, money orders, and other services often utilized by nearly 68 million Americans who do not use or have access to a traditional bank.

The paper highlighted the average household who uses "alternative financial services" spends nearly $2,500 a year—or 10 percent of their income—on interest and fees alone, and the Postal Service is seeking to

Mail customers are generally willing to accept lower levels of service such as ending six-day mail delivery to keep the U.S. Postal Service operating—and especially so if they are aware that the agency does not draw on tax revenue—a study by the USPS inspector general has found.

“Educating citizens on the self-funded nature of the Postal Service and the challenges it faces could help garner citizens’ support for cost-saving initiatives,” the report said, adding that “there was a consensus that the Postal Service must carry on,” with almost all participants saying they would be negatively affected if it ceased to exist.

This week Structural Graphics will show how sound and LED lights can brighten and impact any marketing effort. Structural Graphics worked with the Nationwide Financial team to produce a Retirement Flexible Advantage sales aid which featured LED lighting housed inside a Popper mechanism.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) offered an amendment to a bill (H.R 4011) going through committee that would ease restrictions on private carriers bidding to carry postal service deliveries to certain parts of Alaska.

Cummings withdrew his proposal for lack of support. Cumming's amendment would create new officer charged with leading the development of products and services that would enable the Postal Service to meet changing customer demands. It would also authorize the Postal Service to offer a range of non-postal products including check cashing services.

Though the Postal Service has been able to grow revenue by capitalizing on opportunities in Shipping and Package Services and has aggressively reduced operating costs, losses continue to mount due to the persistent decline of higher-margin First-Class Mail, stifling legal mandates, and its inflexible business and governance models.

Wisconsin's paper mills and printing press operators, collectively the single biggest industrial sector in the state, suffered a setback Thursday when a U.S. Senate committee advanced legislation that would make permanent last month's temporary 4.3 percent increase in postal rates.

The increase, which went into effect Jan. 26, originally was meant as a two-year emergency reprieve to stabilize the U.S. Postal Service, which has been bleeding losses in the tens of billions of dollars over the past seven years.

The Senate committee approved a price shock that adds another twist in a downward spiral, said Joel Quadracci, chief executive of Quad/Graphics