Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

Don’t be surprised if you start seeing more solicitations for Discover cards showing up in your mailbox. The U.S. Postal Service and Discover Financial Services have reached a deal giving Discover incentives to increase its mail volume during the next three years. The arrangement could set a pattern for deals with other large mailers that, like Discover, are mailing fewer customer statements these days because of online billing.

The Negotiated Service Agreement “is intended to promote new growth in Standard Mail that will help offset the expected decline in DFS’ First-Class Mail volume,” says USPS’ recent filing.

Patrick Donahoe, the 73rd Postmaster General of the United States, is taking control of an organization in fiscal crisis. Donahoe tells Federal News Radio he’s confident the USPS will return to black, but not without cutting back on mail delivery days.

“The loss of first class volume puts a lot of additional cost pressure” on the postal service, said Donahoe. “We eventually will have to go from six to five days from a delivery standpoint to remain in the black.”

Donahoe explained, “our first class volume is dropping at a rate of six percent per year.

House Republicans are tapping two freshmen to lead congressional oversight of the federal workforce and U.S. Postal Service. Reps. Dennis A. Ross (R-Fla.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.) will serve as chairman and vice chairman of the panel’s subcommittee on the federal workforce, U.S. Postal Service and labor policy, according to aides for committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

Though the Postal Service is seeking serious structural reforms, it is still unclear how far Congress is willing to go to revamp it. USPS lost $8.5 billion in the fiscal year that ended in September and postal executives are seeking passage

The U.S. Postal Service will announce rate increases for most classes of mail, but apparently not for the First-Class stamp, later today, according to a reliable source. Postal officials put the word out today to some mailing associations that rates for the “market-dominant” classes—First-Class, Standard and Periodicals—would rise in mid-April. The average increase for each class is capped at 1.741 percent, based on annual changes in the Consumer Price Index.

A postal official indicated it would keep the price of a First-Class stamp at 44 cents, enabling it to impose higher-than-cap increases on First-Class flats.

With a radical management reorganization, including the break-up of the Intelligent Mail group, new Postmaster General Pat Donahoe showed once again yesterday that he won’t just quietly follow in his predecessor’s footsteps. Exactly what the new structure means is not completely clear, but what is clear is that more change is coming.

“Today's actions and announcements are the beginning of a much larger process that will involve every level of the organization, including the closure of some Districts. As we continue our restructuring, we anticipate that Reduction in Force (RIF) and Voluntary Early Retirement (VER) processes will be initiated

About the last source from which you’d expect to promote a shift to digital delivery is a company with a rich history of putting pages in envelopes and into the mailstream. But that just what Pitney Bowes is doing with Volly, a new service offering launching in the middle of this year.

The nation’s largest postal union has summoned its top leaders this week to Washington as negotiations for a new multi-year contract with the U.S. Postal Service appear close to an impasse. Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said Monday that he is “increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress” in contract negotiations with USPS.

Guffey, in a message posted on the union’s Website, said talks on a labor agreement that was set to expire Nov. 20 have continued, but “six weeks later, management negotiators seem unwilling to make the commitment necessary to reach a negotiated settlement.”

A recent Office of Inspector General report cited unofficial “Hot 2C” (or “Hot Periodicals”) programs as a major reason for the extensive—and expensive—manual processing of magazines and newspapers that supposedly help make periodicals a money-loser for the USPS. “Periodicals publishers have repeatedly made clear that they do not desire and are not willing to pay for ‘hot’ processing," Jim O’Brien, Vice President, Distribution & Postal Affairs for Time Inc., responded yesterday in a letter (full text is below) to the OIG. “Every publisher that we at Time Inc. have spoken with is quite willing to live within the USPS’ published

The latest example of the Postal Service’s regulatory two-step came Friday with the announcement of indefinite delays to “Full-Service eDoc postage corrections”—that is, denial of Full-Service Intelligent Mail barcode discounts because of alleged errors—which were supposed to be implemented on Jan. 2. The ostensible reason was “to give mailers more time to use information from a new report to help correct errors in their electronic documentation,” but there’s more to the story than that.

“The USPS needs more time just as much as, if not more so, than the mailers,” wrote Lisa Bowes, who has reported extensively on Intelligent

The maximum 2011 price increase on most types of mail dropped a bit this morning because the U.S. Postal Service did not submit price increases before the Consumer Price Index for November was released. The price cap on such market-dominant classes as First-Class, Standard and Periodicals dropped to 1.741%, down from 1.799% if USPS had announced price increases before today. The cap is likely to drop below 1.65% if the Postal Service waits for the December CPI to be released on Jan. 14 before submitting 2011 price increases.

The Postal Service didn’t know how inflation-based price caps