Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

Rep. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., announced on Friday that she intended to introduce legislation reducing the salaries of the postmaster general and his immediate subordinates to the level of Cabinet secretaries. The legislation would overturn the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which authorized USPS executives to be paid salaries of up to 120 percent of the vice president’s annual compensation, plus bonuses. Postal officials, however, argued because USPS functions like a company, it is important for executive salaries to remain competitive with the private sector.

TAG (Targeted Account Generator) uses online microsites to provide an individualized product offer, which the consumer is then incentivized to share across social platforms. “It offers a means to integrate digital, print, transactional and social channels,” says SourceLink Chief Marketing Officer Pat O’Brien.

Tom Carper, the Senator for Delaware and a leading voice in Congress pushing for major postal reforms, said that it was “unclear” why the Postal Regulatory Commission was expecting to take until this summer to produce its advisory opinion on USPS downsizing plans. At a hearing of the  Senate regarding the nomination of Tony Hammond to return as a postal commissioner, Carper said if the Commission cannot produce even preliminary findings by May, it could find itself sidelined as USPS looks to begin plant closures as soon as possible.

The Commission is scheduled to take until mid-July to take in testimony.

In preparation for this issue's feature article on database management, we came up with the most vague question possible to ask printers: How do you add value to your customers' jobs through database management?

It’s commonplace for consumers to oversimplify the matter and categorize all mail as “junk.” I believe we, as marketers, are partly to blame. The lack of creativity and strategy when it comes to many direct mail campaigns is disheartening.

The U.S. Postal Service’s financial situation is starting to “look like Greece,” the Postmaster General told mailers last week, because of resistance to changing the agency’s obviously unsustainable cost structure. If Congress doesn’t allow USPS to change, Postmaster General Pat Donahoe told the Mailers Technical Advisory Committee by 2016 it will have $60 billion in annual revenue, but $90 billion worth of debt.

Postal executives told the mailers group that their long-term plan for turning USPS’s finances around has not changed significantly in the past two years, except that mail volume has dropped faster than they expected.

We need to do a better job as an industry understanding the preconceptions of those outside our industry and proactively framing the conversation. Let’s rally around what is right, and act as one. We too, can find a way through tough times and get fighting again.

President Obama proposed a special increase in postage rates and an end to Saturday delivery as part of a plan to right the U.S. Postal Service’s finances. The Obama Administration’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget plan would also end the “pre-payments” for retiree health insurance and return the overpayments into a retirement fund, which have been the major sources of its recent budget deficits.

One part of USPS’s short-run relief would be allowing it “to seek the balance of the modest one-time increase in postage rates it proposed in 2010.” Obama released a deficit-reduction plan in September that contained similar language.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Monday that he hoped Republicans would join him in pushing for changes to a measure overhauling the U.S. Postal Service’s operations. Sanders has led the charge in recent days to alter the bipartisan Senate postal bill, and has said that he has concerns that USPS is pressing to make modifications that would hurt rural communities and eliminate jobs.

“At a time when the Postal Service is facing very significant financial problems from e-mail and the Internet, slowing down mail delivery service does not make any sense at all,” Sanders said Monday.

A review of the performance of postal service providers by the Oxford Strategic Consulting firm ranks the U.S. Postal Service the best postal service within the world’s top 20 largest economies for access to services, resource efficiency and public trust.