Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

PODi’s recent report, “Traffic Generation Solutions for the Retail Market,” reviews several successful applications, highlighting ideas that work and the results achieved. Chick-fil-A franchise owners in Covington, LA, needed a direct marketing solution to establish a customer database and increase store traffic.

The U.S. Postal Service’s estimate that its “workforce optimization” plan will require 120,000 layoffs in the next four years may be substantially understating the number of postal workers who would be forced out. The recently released plan calls for shedding 220,000 career employees over the next four years. It estimates that attrition will take care of 100,000 employees, meaning the rest of the cuts would have to come from layoffs.

The estimate accurately reflects recent trends, when the number of career employees declined by just over 25,000 in a 12-month period. But there’s a big reason not to project recent trends

Every Door Direct Mail, as the service is called, was launched back in April, offering businesses an easier way to mail items to every doorstep in a given area, without having to get hold of specific addresses for individual households. So far, the service has averaged more than 45,000 visits each month to its online tool, which allows users to simply select an area on a map in order to obtain numbers of households in targeted delivery routes.

Last week, the Postal Service revealed new figures stating that 12,097 customers have registered to use the new service...There have been 9,292 transactions

The mail industry in the United States now appears to be “too fragile” for the U.S. Postal Service to raise its postal rates by above-inflation amounts, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said. Speaking at the latest quarterly meeting of the USPS with its major customers and industry associations, Donahoe declared that the Postal Service is dropping its legal battle with regulators to force a 5.6 percent rate increase.

Donahoe advised mailers that when it comes to future rate increases “plan on no more-than-CPI increases.”

This week’s Mailers Technical Advisory Committee meeting at USPS headquarters was dominated by the bombshell announcement

Under Rep. Darrell Issa’s bill, the 40 percent discount that nonprofits have been getting for the postage rates on their mailings since Congress authorized it in 1951 would be reduced by 5 percent a year, and to 10 percent after six years.

It is part of a larger effort to overhaul the Postal Service, which is facing a second year of losses totaling $8 billion or more. The bill would establish a control board to restructure the Postal Service and reduce costs to get the agency back on track, saving at least $2 billion a year.

The dramatic downsizing of the U.S. Postal Service’s workforce has slowed considerably in the past year, according to USPS documents. The number of career employees decreased by only 25,409 in the 12 months leading up to June 2011, according to a USPS document released last week, vs. 44,145 in the previous 12 months and 36,326 in the year before that. That means the annual net attrition rate declined from 7.0 percent to 4.3 percent in the course of a year.

Much of the slowing attrition rate occurred in the 151,385-employee “Clerks/Nurses” category, which lost 7,839 workers in the past year

Bloomberg Businessweek has been rapidly expanding an “alternative distribution” plan to print subscribers. Since last December, the magazine has been partnering with newspaper publishers and other delivery services to have the magazine hand-delivered with the Friday morning paper. Currently, 9 percent of the magazine's 860,000 domestic print subscribers already receive the magazine this way. The publisher wants to expand into other metro regions and raise that to 30 percent by the end of the year.

The magazine likely won't stop there. Instead, to counteract delays caused by the Postal Service’s FSS equipment and a potential five-day delivery schedule, it will

The chairman of the commission that regulates the U.S. Postal Service said she supports a taxpayer subsidy for the financially strapped agency. “Whatever it would be, would be small and manageable over time,” Ruth Y. Goldway told the editorial board of The Washington Post.

Goldway also said she believes the agency can do more to boost revenue even as mail volume continues to decline because of the Internet. Congress gives the Postal Service about $96 million a year in compensation for postage-free mailing for the blind and disabled and for absentee ballots sent from US citizens living overseas.

An apparently unintended consequence of the proposed bipartisan “Gang of Six” deficit-reduction deal is that it could reduce future inflation-based increases in U.S. Postal Service wages and rates. One section of the plan calls for a “shift to the chained-CPI (a more accurate measure of inflation) government-wide starting in 2012” to calculate changes in inflation. The document adds that, “According to CBO [the Congressional Budget Office], the shift to chained-CPI would result in the annual adjustment growing, on average, about 0.25 percentage points per year slower than the current CPI.”

Chained-CPI takes into account people’s tendency to substitute a less expensive

Two of the U.S. Postal Service’s most successful methods for cutting costs—early-retirement incentives and automation—are no longer viable strategies because of USPS’s cash crunch, according to a report released today. “Overall, offering more early retirements for eligible employees would create additional cost savings,” says the report from the USPS Office of Inspector General on USPS’s cost structure. It noted a Postal Service statement indicating that savings from buyouts of more than 20,000 clerks and mail handlers two years ago have already doubled the $15,000-per-retiree payouts.

“The problem, however, is how to incentivize further buyouts that the Postal Service cannot afford to