Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

The Obama Administration proposed above-inflation increases in postage rates Monday, just a week after the Postal Service indicated it had backed off of just such a rate hike for fear of hurting the printing industry. The President released a deficit-reduction plan that would “permit USPS to seek the modest one-time increase in postage rates it proposed a year ago.”

A week earlier, Deputy Postmaster General Ron Stroman explained in an interview why the Postal Service had decided not to pursue such an “exigent” rate increase: “One of the things we have seen in ongoing discussions with the print industry is

President Obama supports allowing the U.S. Postal Service to stop delivering mail on Saturdays and to start selling items other than stamps and shipping supplies at post offices nationwide, according to his deficit reduction proposals released Monday. The White House is also calling on Congress to return $7 billion that USPS paid into a federal retirement fund to the delivery service to help pay for other retirement and health-care costs.

Obama’s plans also would allow the Postal Service to raise stamp prices beyond the rate of inflation to better match the cost of delivery.

The White House said its proposals would

Republican lawmaker Darrell Issa plans to offer an amendment that boosts the annual savings in his bill to overhaul the U.S. Postal Service to more than $10 billion, his office said. A draft version of the Issa amendment viewed by Reuters doubles the amount the agency would have to save by closing mail processing facilities, phases out delivery to front-door mail slots, and reduces the postal workforce starting with retirement-eligible workers before laying off other employees.

Issa’s bill would end Saturday mail and set up groups to close facilities and cut costs if the agency misses payments to the federal

With all the confusion in the news media about the U.S. Postal Service’s financial problems, finally one writer nails it on the head. In “Next Washington Debacle: The Broke Postal Service” at Seeking Alpha, usnews.com columnist Rick Newman succinctly summarizes “how Congress has made the mail service a national embarrassment:”

1) Hamstringing its finances: “The postal service faces unusual limits on its ability to manage costs, such as an obligation imposed by a 2006 law to ’prefund’ a large portion of its retiree healthcare plan, instead of a more typical pay-as-you-go arrangement.” Newman doesn’t mention that the prefunding is an accounting

Suddenly last week, it seemed, news of the Postal Service’s dire straits was everywhere—on front pages, leading off network newscasts, featured in one of David Letterman’s famous Top 10 lists, and the subject of a hilarious “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” bit. What turned the tide wasn’t highly paid lobbyists, high-powered PR consultants, ot clever slogans. (Remember efforts to brand so-called prepaid retiree health benefits as a “Stamp Tax?”)

The key was a bit of Reality Therapy, in the form of postal executives spelling out what they would have to do to keep the Postal Service solvent in light of

In financial trouble that has it on the brink of default, the U.S. Postal Service is making an aggressive appeal to catalogers and other advertisers to ramp up their mailings. The theory is that their revenue can make up for steep declines in first-class consumer and business mail that has migrated online.

The Postal Service is seeking to make direct mailing friendlier in hopes of luring more revenue by reaching out to new users. At present, only about 22 percent of businesses use direct mail. A new Post Office program targeting small businesses called “Every Door Direct Mail” allows marketers to

Imagine a nation without the Postal Service. No more birthday cards and bills or magazines and catalogs filling the mailbox. It's a worst-case scenario being painted for an organization that lost $8.5 billion in 2010 and seems headed deeper into the red this year.

The Postal Service is not going out of business," postal spokesman David Partenheimer said. "We will continue to deliver the mail as we have for more than 200 years. The postmaster general has developed a plan that will return the Postal Service to financial stability. We continue to do what we can on our own to achieve

FundRaising Success magazine is pleased to announce the winners of its 2011 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence. Top prize this year went to the World Vision Back to School Bounceback “Flight” package, which won Package of the Year and the Gold Award in the Direct-Mail Category.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on the agency’s predicament on Tuesday. So far, feuding Democrats and Republicans in Congress, still smarting from the brawl over the federal debt ceiling, have failed to agree on any solutions. It doesn’t help that many of the options for saving the postal service are politically unpalatable.

“The situation is dire,” said Thomas R. Carper, the Delaware Democrat who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversees the postal service. “If we do nothing, if we don’t react in a smart, appropriate way, the postal service could literally close

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has launched SavingThePostalService.com to educate the public about the Postal Service’s financial troubles and some possible solutions. U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has said that the U.S. Postal Service will default on its obligations to the federal government on September 30, at the end of the current fiscal year.