Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

After a test that began in May, sparked by concerns that post-office cutbacks would only continue to worsen, New York is now rolling out hand delivery to doorman buildings and commercial addresses in Manhattan. “Hand delivery means you’ll get New York on Monday mornings—earlier than is possible by U.S. mail,” New York explained in a letter to some subscribers.

The cost is competitive with the post office or cheaper…Once the rollout is complete, New York will be hand-delivering nearly 60,000 subscriber and complimentary copies to Manhattan addresses, about 60 percent of the magazine’s file in Manhattan.

This webinar is a must for Marketing Service Providers and other print professionals who want to expand their offerings to include Every Door Direct Mail® from the Postal Service.^TM More and more businesses are asking Marketing Service Providers to help them prepare their mailings for Every Door Direct Mail. Learn everything you need to know to build your business with Every Door Direct Mail.

This webinar shows you:

• Two Every Door Direct Mail options to meet specific business needs.
• How to sell Every Door Direct Mail to your business customers.
• Eligible formats with specifications and samples of each.
• How to prepare printed mailpieces for Postal entry.
• And much more!

The Ballantine Corp. has published a new case study examining the response rates of a direct mail campaign based on two outer envelope color options. Lapham’s Quarterly was curious to see if changing the color of the outer envelope of its subscription mailer to white, but keeping the rest of it the same, would have any effect on response.

At the end of this month, the U.S. Postal Service takes another step toward insolvency. On Sunday, the service is required by law to pay the federal government $5.6 billion to fund health care benefits for retirees. But it won’t do it, because it doesn’t have the money. It will be the second time that the service has defaulted on a payment, the first occurring on Aug. 1.

“This default will have no effect on the processing or delivery of mail, and employees and suppliers will continue to be paid,” said David Partenheimer, a spokesman for the Postal Service.

The U.S. Postal Service could save about $1 billion annually by closing nearly 10,000 postal facilities that house both retail and carrier functions, according to a study released today. A plan presented by the USPS’s Office of Inspector General would mean fewer clerks and postmasters, but increased labor costs for letter carriers.

“The greatest opportunities for facility consolidation are with the highest-density ZIP Codes where the space per route is high and other units are nearby,” the report says. That’s in apparent contrast to the Postal Service’s own approach to closing post offices, which critics claim overwhelmingly focuses on sparsely populated

Lawmakers returned to Washington, DC, this week with a packed agenda. Topping the list of priorities is hammering out final details of a stopgap spending measure to keep the government running. Amid the election-year politicking, the list of unfinished business also includes legislation to restructure the financially ailing U.S. Postal Service.

The Senate approved a postal reform bill in the spring. However, the House version, which takes a very different tack to returning the USPS to solvency, has languished.

That has prompted Rep. Darrell Issa...to propose including an interim postal reform package in the CR to be introduced this week.

USPS delivered fewer than 139 mail pieces per work hour in July, a 3.7 percent decrease from the July 2011 level of 144 pieces, according to preliminary numbers the service released Tuesday. The agency’s net loss for the month was $1.327 billion, nearly $300 million more than planned and more than $500 million worse than last year.

The productivity trend for the full fiscal year (starting October 1) isn’t much better. USPS has delivered 143 pieces per work hour so far in FY2012, down 2.5 percent from the same 10 months of FY2011.

Mail volume declined more than 4 percent.

The POSTPlan reflects a determination by the Postal Service to explore options to adjust its retail window hours without closing post offices. Retail window hours of operation at more than 13,000 post offices nationwide will be reduced to six, four, or two hours per weekday, and in approximately 73 locations, hours of operation will increase.

The Newspaper Association of America is stunned by the Postal Regulatory Commission’s decision to approve an anti-competitive and damaging negotiated services agreement between the U.S. Postal Service and Valassis Direct Mail. “NAA believes this decision is contrary to law, and will challenge it immediately and vigorously in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,” said NAA Chairman James M. Moroney III.

Exactly why House Republican leaders chose not to act on any postal reform legislation before autumn is still a bit of a mystery. But last week’s Dead Tree Edition article on the subject stirred up plenty of theories and heated comments.

Amidst all the vitriol and conspiracy theories, seven additional interesting and sometimes insightful theories emerged to explain the GOP's inaction on the growing postal crisis:

1) Why bail out Obama?
2) All pain, no gain.
3) No consensus.
4) Let it fail.
5) The real GOP plan is privatization.
6) If you can’t retire them, scare them off.
7) Who cares?