Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

Regulators approved changes on Wednesday, which would mean that companies that have a negotiated service agreement with USPS would no longer have to pay up front before they can mail their advertising materials. These payment terms could still include prepayment, USPS noted, but could also specify other payment methods such as direct electronic bank transfers.

“The (Postal Regulatory) Commission is unaware of any prohibition which would bar its use by the Postal Service,” the regulators concluded, adding that future negotiated services agreements would have to specify the alternative postal payment method being used.

The decision to eliminate next-day delivery of First Class mail could cost a typical large U.S. company up to $100 million each year by making it significantly harder to collect from customers quickly, according to new research from REL Consulting.

All Post Offices nationwide will be open on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. Commercial customers should check with their Business Mail Entry Units for hours of operation. Mail delivery will be the same as any other Saturday.

Now the Congressional silliness regarding Postmaster General Pat Donahoe has gone bipartisan. Rep. Dennis Ross indicated a few days ago that Donahoe should be fired—apparently for bowing to pressure from 20 senators and agreeing to a mostly meaningless moratorium on the closing of postal facilities. The Republican subcommittee chairman’s attack comes less than two weeks after Democratic Congressman Peter DeFazio said Donahoe should be canned for trying to save money by lowering the Postal Service’s delivery standards.

Can Donahoe focus on building new revenue sources or developing long-range plans, the way the CEO of any other multibillion-dollar business would? Nope,

Despite all the talk of restructuring and downsizing at the U.S. Postal Service, its labor costs have hardly budged in the past year. With employees working more overtime and relatively few retiring, the agency’s cost of salary and benefits inched down by barely 1 percent during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2011. So far this (calendar) year, the decline is a paltry 0.2 percent lower than the same time last year. In contrast, USPS projects that its revenues will decrease nearly 3 percent this fiscal year.

One barrier to cost cutting is a slowing attrition rate. In the Postal

For years, a likely voter’s mailbox on a Saturday before an election has been among the most contested public spaces in American political life, and the disappearance of that one day from the calendar could trigger a series of subtle but important shifts in the tactics of last-minute campaign communication.

Indeed, the elimination of Saturday delivery threatens to disrupt a golden era for political mail. Thanks to the mail’s precision and universality, no other format for political communication has been so good at exploiting the analytical innovations that have reshaped modern campaigns. Refinements in individual-level targeting have made brochures the most

Many weekly magazines deliberately try to reach subscribers in time for the weekend, when there's more time for reading—and shopping trips that might wind up reflecting advertisers' suggestions. Losing Saturday would delay many copies until Monday, when the competition for time and attention is stiffer.

Time magazine changed its schedule four years ago expressly to become a weekend read, and enough copies arrive on Saturdays that the Postal Service proposal would mean many subscribers don't see copies until Monday. "If the postal schedule changes, we will explore all options to maintain pre-weekend delivery," a Time staffer said.

As the postal drama continues to unfold, printers and mailers are mindful of their obligation to continue providing customers with maximized printing and postage savings. That won’t change, regardless of what the USPS looks like in five or 10 years.

The U.S. Postal Service’s reach into every state and congressional district is a big reason why Americans shouldn’t expect Congress to make the drastic changes that the postmaster general says are needed for the service to survive—especially before the 2012 election.

Proposals to cut Saturday service and close underused post offices in order to save billions of dollars have met united opposition from Democrats and many of the conservative Republicans who swept into office campaigning on smaller government.

Cornell University associate professor Richard Geddes compared efforts to save the postal service to the closures of under-used military bases. In concept, lawmakers support

George Will is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political commentator who has penned some of the most beautiful prose ever written about baseball. But yesterday, in opining about the U.S. Postal Service, he whiffed when it came to basic fact checking. After a fascinating history lesson about how Sunday mail delivery was discontinued a century ago, Will threw this clunker into his commentary for the The Washington Post:

“Surely the government could cede this function to the private sector, which probably could have a satisfactory substitute system functioning quicker than you can say ‘FedEx,’ ‘UPS’ and ‘Wal-Mart.’ The first two are good