Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

The chances for meaningful postal reform this year are slim if neither political party gets a mandate from Congressional elections – and none if one party wins control of both houses. That’s the consensus of several postal experts who have spoken or written recently about the status of postal legislation.

“If the Republicans get a majority in the Senate and hold their majority in the House, nothing will happen until 2013. If the Democrats hold the Senate majority and the Republicans hold the House, MAYBE something could happen in the lame duck session. If the Dems win the House and Senate,

William Burrus, former president of the agency's largest labor union and long a vocal critic of USPS management, urged fellow APWU members not to hold out for a better offer than the $15,000 incentive announced this week. “If you intend to retire my advice is to ‘take the money and run,’ there is zero possibility that the amount will be increased,” Burrus wrote in his blog.

“My best estimate is that, of the 115,000 APWU represented eligibles, there will be somewhere in the range of 35,000 who will take the money and run.”

The Postal Service and one of its largest unions have agreed to offer retirement incentives to a wide swath of postal employees. Employees who accept the buyout—who must have at least 20 years tenure at 50 years old, or have worked at least 25 years—would leave USPS at the end of January 2013. They would receive $10,000 in May 2013, and then the last $5,000 in May 2014.

The agreement between USPS and APWU comes after months of negotiations, and marks just the latest example of the cash-strapped Postal Service using buyouts to try and cut costs.

The U.S. Postal Service’s plan to reduce its mail-processing network by half has a major flaw, according to a Postal Regulatory Commission opinion released Friday: The plan would tend “to move processing assignments from more productive plants to less productive plants.”

USPS goofed in assuming that consolidating mail sorting into larger plants would improve productivity, according to the PRC’s advisory opinion on the Postal Service’s ambitious Network Rationalization plan. In fact, larger plants historically have tended to process fewer mail pieces per workhour than smaller ones, the PRC’s analysis finds.

In theory, large plants have the advantage of more automation

The USPS’s Network Rationalization Plan, opposed by some postal unions and not-in-my-district Congress members, would cut the number of processing centers nearly in half by 2015—from 461 this year to 232 in 2015. That’s down from 673 in 2006 and 599 in 2009.

The impact would be especially dramatic in certain regions. Several states—including Mississippi, Kansas, and Arizona—would go from having six or more facilities to only one.

It’s not just sparsely populated areas that would lose most of their processing centers. West Virginia, which had 11 centers barely two years ago, would be left with only Charleston.

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