Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

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

As Vermont’s congressional lawmakers find new ways to communicate with constituents online, they continue to rely on a proven standby: taxpayer-funded snail mail. Mass mailings are still the best way to reach constituents who don’t have a computer or who aren’t comfortable using one, Rep. Peter Welch and Sen. Bernie Sanders say.

House members are allowed to spend as much of their allowances per legislative year as they want on franked print and electronic communications. Senators are limited to spending $50,000 on mass mailings, defined as 500 or more identical pieces of mail, per fiscal year.

About 19 percent of Vermont households

UPS Mail Innovations manages the pick-up, processing and sorting of outbound flat mail pieces, bound printed matter and parcels weighing less than one pound. Tracking information for such shipments now is available on the company’s website.

The USPS runs a net operational profit delivering the mail. Even with the worst recession in 80 years, even with Internet diversion, the USPS takes in more money from postal operations than it spends. Over the past four years, revenues exceeded costs by $837 million; last quarter’s net operating profit alone was $226 million.

The $20 billion in losses cited over the past four years has surprisingly little to do with declining mail volume or the Internet. Rather, it stems from the 2006 congressional mandate that the USPS prefund future retiree health benefits for the next 75 years, and do

In “Donahoe’s Answer to Postal Bailout Criticism,” we noted the Postmaster General’s recent article explaining that the U.S. Postal Service’s financial straits are a creation of Congress rather than actual financial losses. But the article omits key points, partly because the Postal Service can’t afford to offend Congress right now with the unvarnished truth.

Here are six more things that ignorant critics in Congress and the news media need to consider about USPS finances:

1) Congressional game: The Postal Service is the victim of a Congressional accounting game. What Donahoe diplomatically labels “prepayment to the Retiree Health Benefit fund” was more accurately

The U.S. Postal Service announced that it will end preferential treatment for time-sensitive Periodicals mail this Friday, a move that could delay delivery of some daily and weekly publications by a day. “All Periodicals will be processed efficiently on automated or mechanized equipment where postal facilities have this type of equipment,” says a letter USPS officials sent to “Periodicals mailers” and members of the Mailers Technical Advisory Committee. “Since all Periodicals (daily, weekly, quarterly and monthly) have the same processing expectations and service standards, they will be processed based upon arrival times and service standards, not publication titles.”