Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

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.”

A U.S. Postal Service decision to suspend employer contributions to a postal worker retirement account is causing alarm among its employees. “It was sheer chaos on the work floor when everybody found out about it this morning,” said Clarice Torrence, who has worked for the Postal Service for 32 years. “How long is this going to go on? Are they going to play catch-up?”

While the Postal Service has said this is a temporary measure, the president of the American Postal Workers Union said he is not assured that employees will not be negatively affected.

“We will take every step necessary to

Mail delivery of many newspapers and magazines could soon be delayed a day because of a new U.S. Postal Service program to streamline processing of flat mail. Postal officials believe the changes will significantly reduce the costs attributed to the Periodicals class, which the Postal Service has targeted for rate increases because the class is supposedly not profitable.

Included in the plan is the end of “Hot 2C” processing that provides expedited—and expensive—manual handling of such time-sensitive publications as The Wall Street Journal and other daily and weekly publications. Another aspect of the plan is nationwide Critical Entry Times—deadlines for drop-shipped

The ongoing realignment of postal facilities to better fit the changing needs of customers is saving the Postal Service millions of dollars, but it and other cost-cutting measures are not enough to stave off a fast-approaching liquidity crisis, a House subcommittee was told Wednesday.

With each passing day, it is more obvious that the U.S. Postal Service’s business model is “not viable,” as a Government Accountability Office report put it last year. USPS, in short, could be unable to make payroll in the near term unless Congress acts. Yet the likeliest answer from Capitol Hill is to extend more aid, enabling USPS to limp along for a few more years, without attacking the Postal Service’s dysfunction at the roots...we can’t help noting that these service cuts are necessary, in part, because the Postal Service has not done more to cut other still-unreasonable costs:

[Kinston (NC) Republican Rep. Stephen] LaRoque is pushing a measure that would require lawyers to wait 30 days before they begin filling victims’ mailboxes with solicitations. The bill is modeled on a Florida rule and is partly inspired by his family’s experience after a stepdaughter and her three children were in an accident.

“The children all got these solicitations. She got them,” LaRoque said. “We didn’t need all this stuff. It was stacked up 2 feet tall.”

LaRoque’s bill has drawn instant skepticism from lawyers and insurers.

“The reason lawyers send letters in the mail is that people want information and they respond