During July and August, mailers launching campaigns incorporating two-dimensional, smartphone-friendly barcodes will qualify for an upfront 3 percent postage discount. As for the labor contract that becomes effective today, it is projected to save $3.8 billion over its duration.
In an error-filled editorial, The Wall Street Journal chided the U.S. Postal Service Saturday for not acting more like a business and for being too slow to cut costs. Be careful what you wish for. “If this were a private business, the obvious response to these losses would be urgent cost-cutting to avoid insolvency,” the editorial said in response to USPS’s latest quarterly numbers. Good point. Let’s start with cutting the Postal Service’s subsidization of the Journal.
“(The) Wall Street Journal gives the USPS all of the addresses that they can’t service with alternate delivery and then expects to receive next-day
The watchdogs that keep an eye on the U.S. Postal Service have taken on an unusual role—dreaming up new products and other innovations for the Postal Service. The trend is highlighted by the USPS Office of Inspector General’s release yesterday of a request for proposals to determine how the Postal Service can innovate. The selected consulting company would “benchmark the Postal Service against ten successful companies” to identify best practices and processes in “innovation management” that can be adopted by USPS.
Just last month, the OIG suggested the Postal Service consider such new lines of business as electronic mailboxes, financial services
The Postmaster General didn’t just tell major customers this week that the U.S. Postal Service is a business and not a government agency. He followed up with a move right out of the corporate playbook—announcing plans to stiff a major creditor. Pat Donahoe’s revelations at the National Postal Forum about what the Postal Service planned to do got most of the media attention. But at least as significant was what he said about what the Postal Service will not do.
It won’t offer banking services. It won’t sell cell phones. And it might not make a controversial payment to the federal
At the National Postal Forum in San Diego, Multichannel Merchant sat down with Joseph Corbett, CFO of the U.S. Postal Service to discuss issues relevant to catalogers. MCM: Many catalogers fear their postage rates could increase by as much as 22 percent. How did this come about?
Corbett: The cost coverage report we are required to file annually was reviewed and the Postal Regulatory Commission issued a report. One finding was that they expect us to bring the cost coverages back in line with the standards for complete cost coverage.
MCM: Are other classes of mail complying with these standards?
As mail volume continues to plummet and more Americans use the Internet to pay bills and keep in touch, Google executives, social media experts and some of the most passionate tech evangelists are planning to meet in Crystal City in mid-June to sort out how to save and remake the nation’s mail delivery service.
The conference, PostalVision 2020, is designed to bring together “the people who understand what this technology has done, is doing and will do to digital commerce and communication in America,” according to John Callan, a longtime mailing industry consultant organizing the meeting.
EveryDoorDirectMail.com capitalizes on the popular new simplified mailing program from the U.S. Postal Service. Visitors can target households and businesses, anywhere in the country, via a “point and click” mapping technology dubbed “U-Select.” Combined with Taradel’s graphic design and flyer printing rates, small business owners can design, print and mail giant full-color, glossy flyers for as low as $0.29 per home, including postage.
So much for “Solidarity Forever” - Much of the U.S. Postal Service’s projected savings from the proposed contract with its largest union apparently comes from reassigning duties currently performed by members of other postal-employee associations. Some tasks typically performed by postmasters, supervisors and carriers could be shifted to clerks and other employees represented by the American Postal Workers Union—in some cases, lower-paid non-career employees.
USPS claims it would save $3.8 billion during the course of the 4.5-year contract but has not spelled out where those savings would come from or what assumptions go into its calculations.
Today, Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, held a hearing on the tentative collective bargaining agreement reached last month between the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) and the United States Postal Service. The move pushes Congress into uncharted territory.
Chairman Issa claims that the collective bargaining agreement is too generous to postal workers and will hurt the finances of the USPS, which lost $8.5 billion in fiscal year 2010.
“I have never heard of a congressional hearing being called into a collective bargaining agreement,” said APWU President Cliff Guffey.
The U.S. Postal Service has proposed a review process that officials say could help expedite decisions on facility closures and result in the shuttering of thousands of locations this year. Postal employees work out of about 32,000 locations nationwide, but with a growing number of customers buying stamps and packaging material at pharmacies, groceries and office supply stores, officials said Thursday that it is time to scale back.
The computerized system announced Thursday would allow top officials in Washington to begin reviewing sites by the summer and assess a location’s feasibility within 138 days—a sharply shorter period of review
