Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

House Republicans pushing to overhaul the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service believe adding a prominent backer in the Senate gives their efforts fresh momentum. On Friday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) announced that he was introducing the Senate version of legislation that Issa and others have offered in the House. The bill would, among other things, create a new oversight board to recommend cost-cutting ideas like post office closures, and supporters say it would help tame the agency’s significant labor costs.

Art Sackler, coordinator of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, said the new Senate bill may work to push lawmakers

A year after an industry alliance helped defeat a proposed exigent rate increase by the U.S. Postal Service, the price hike may go through after all, as part of a larger plan to save the troubled institution, which is rapidly approaching insolvency...they have been dusted off by the Obama administration as a possible, partial solution to USPS financial woes.

Periodicals are one of the least profitable mail classes for the USPS, partly because of repeated rejections by the PRC of proposed rate hikes. Catalogs and other types of direct-marketing solicitation, classified as “standard,” are also less profitable than first-class mail,

“We have reduced our annual costs by more than $12 billion and our workforce has been reduced by 110,000 career employees over the past four years, but we must do significantly more to return to profitability,” said Postmaster General and CEO Patrick Donahoe.

Have you ever stood in a long, slow-moving line at a post office and wondered why only one employee was helping customers? The problem is the way the traditional U.S. Post Office is structured, with delivery and retail operations in the same building, according to an Inspector General’s report released today. It’s high time to separate those functions in many urban and suburban areas, says the report, entitled “Retail and Delivery: Decoupling Could Improve Service and Lower Costs.”

“A clerk’s first priority is often back room operational support activities—even if that means a retail customer waits longer in line.”

Alex Husted, database and circulation manager at Edmund Optics, is watching with concern as the U.S. Postal Service faces the possibility of insolvency. Husted, who directs the catalog business of the global imaging and photonics company, is worried, like many marketers, about the possibility of dramatically rising postal rates, as the Postal Service faces another record loss.

“We’re anticipating double-digit postal rate increases annually for the foreseeable future,” Husted said. “When coupled with increasing paper prices, that becomes difficult to manage.”

Husted said Edmund Optics is committed to remaining in the catalog business but is exploring its options.

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