Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

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.

The U.S. Postal Service is, for the second year, planning a summertime promotion for direct mailers that use two-dimensional barcodes, USPS VP of domestic products Gary Reblin told Direct Marketing News on Jan. 31. The details of this year’s promotion will be put before the USPS’s board of governors on Feb. 8 for its approval, Reblin said.

He declined to discuss specifics...he did say this year’s mobile barcode discount promotion will have some different features from last year’s. Reblin said the overarching goal is to “create long-term success for the mail” by getting people more engaged with their mail.

The (Postal Regulatory) Commission said in a decision issued yesterday that its current schedule was “slightly more than one month longer” than a schedule that had been suggested by USPS, and that no new information had been provided by USPS to persuade Commissioners that the change in schedule was warranted.

It concluded: “The significant reduction in schedule duration, as proposed by the Postal Service, would deny participants adequate opportunity to understand the Postal Service’s proposals, and deny the Postal Service an adequate opportunity to understand participants’ evidence and prepare rebuttal.”

The delay...makes the Postal Service more reliant on Congressional action

Congressman Brian Higgins recently held a press conference at Zenger Group, a printing and direct mail service provider, to oppose the scheduled closure of the Postal Service William Street facility in Buffalo, NY. That facility is the postal distribution gateway between the United States and Toronto/southern Ontario.

Effective this week, businesses mailing First-Class Mail automation, presort letters using “2nd Ounce Free” pricing can mail letters weighing up to two ounces at the one-ounce postage rate. It is not a limited time promotion, but a new price for First-Class Mail presort, automation letters.

A right-wing think tank in the United States has issued a white paper criticizing the “disturbing” lack of speed at the US Postal Service in responding to declining mail volumes. It said “most” foreign postal services had managed to restore profitability and remain financially viable despite electronic diversion of mail and the impact of the global downturn.

The Congressional advisory note from the Washington DC-based Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation assessed the USPS in comparison to nearly 60 of the world’s major postal services during the recession and its aftermath.