Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

This week, Structrural Graphics features a launch kit it designed for home appliance manufacturer Maytag. The company wanted an innovative and engaging Point of Sale piece to distribute to its consumer base.

The National Association of Letter Carriers, the American Postal Workers Union, the National Postal Mailhandlers and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association issued a proclamation earlier this month forming a “Postal Union Alliance.”

The proclamation stated that USPS was under “unprecedented attack” from a crisis it claimed was manufactured by the US Congress—a reference to the Congressionally-mandated payments USPS must make to the federal government to cover liabilities such as future retiree healthcare benefits.

Together, the unions said they would push for the protection of six-day-per-week mail delivery, the restoration of mail service standards and mail processing facilities and the provision of

Chief Human Resources Officer and Executive Vice President Jeffrey Williamson testified before the United States House of Representatives Subcommittee yesterday on Federal Workforce, U.S. Postal Service and the Census during a hearing titled "At a Crossroads: The Postal Service’s $100 Billion in Unfunded Liabilities." "The enactment of comprehensive postal reform legislation cannot wait," said Williamson. "The Postal Service has exhausted its borrowing authority, faces unnecessary and artificial costs that it cannot afford, and is constrained by law from correcting the problem...

You probably think you’ve heard it before. The nation’s top postal official wants to end Saturday delivery because he thinks it’s no longer cost-effective. He’s closing government post offices and opening up new ones in stores, insisting this will save money and provide more convenience to customers.

Yes, U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe is calling for these things. But so is Norway Post CEO Dag Mejdell. Norway Post isn’t doing as badly as the USPS, which lost $5 billion in 2013.

Ultimately, the USPS needs to start digitizing the mail stream as Norway Post has done. It has tried to move

This week, Structrural Graphics shows a gift card packaging concept it developed for client Victoria's Secret. When the recipient pulls on the right hand-side, another panel, carrying the gift card, automatically extends out to the left, presenting the recipient with their gift.

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