United States Postal Service

Current Chairman of the Senate for Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Senator Tom Carper, recently shared his views with Republic 3.0 on keeping the U.S. Postal Service viable in the 21st Century.

While we agree with Senator Carper that Congress needs to act during the lame-duck session following the November elections, we are also adamant to make sure the reform is meaningful for mailers, rather than making the current situation worse.

We disagree with his assumptions related to pricing.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe made a statement this week demonstrating that postal executives’ views about weekend delivery of packages have changed significantly in the past four years. "The future will be a seven-day package world and a five-day mail world," a USA Today article quoted Donahoe as saying.

In recent months, weekend delivery of parcels has gone from obligation to opportunity. The Postal Service is delivering Amazon packages in a growing number of urban markets. In San Francisco, it is testing same-day, seven-days-a-week delivery for multiple retailers and today added early-morning grocery deliveries to its test offerings in that city.

The program, known as "mail covers," records the exterior data—names, return address and any other information—of letters and packages before they're delivered to a person of interest. While that data is usually recorded for USPS services anyway, it has been more readily available in response to requests.

The troubling bit is there is little to no oversight involved in the process. The New York Times piece uses the illustration of a local county sheriff using the program to keep tabs on a political activist in his community—a clear abuse of power.

NYT commenters were quick to add wit to wisdom.

First, the U.S. Postal Service delivered groceries for AmazonFresh in San Francisco. Then on Friday, USPS expanded the delivery area to "additional major metropolitan markets nationwide."

At 4:19 p.m. on Thursday, the Postal Regulatory Commission issued an "Order Authorizing Customized Delivery Market Test." (Opens as a PDF) In other words, the PRC is allowing USPS to conduct an expanded market test for the next two years, beyond what the postal service has already done in San Francisco. What USPS did there was load up on AmazonFresh bags—delivered to USPS by AmazonFresh's participating retailers

In just two and a half years, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has gone from hero to villain in the eyes of a leading publishing-industry magazine.

Folio: named the U.S. Postal Service’s CEO this week to its Folio: 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the magazine industry, in the "disruptor" category.

Folio:’s slap at the PMG was a far cry from April 2012, when the magazine hailed Donahoe because "he has pledged to support the magazine industry."

How to blend mobile technology with print to deliver more effective direct marketing campaigns was the key topic of discussion in the recent "Mail Meets Mobile: Combining Physical and Digital to Deliver Better Results for Your Customers" Webinar, presented by Printing Impressions and In-plant Graphics and sponsored by Pitney Bowes.

According to U.S Postal Service spokesman Dave Partenheimer, the Governors of the U.S. Postal Service have decided not to seek a price change for mail and shipping products and services in January because of the uncertainty regarding the exigent price increase.

Because of announcements made on Wednesday, publishers can scratch the usual January postage rate increase from their 2015 budgets but should probably count on price increases for coated paper.

The U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors announced it would not raises prices on "market-dominant" mail classes early next year, contrary to its usual practice of implementing inflation-based price hikes in January.

The bad news came from Verso Paper, which is closing its Bucksport, ME, coated paper mill. That, coupled with the recent closure of the FutureMark mill in Illinois, could mean an end to rock-bottom prices for magazine-quality paper in 2015.

The Postal Service Governors have decided to maintain current product and service prices and not seek a market dominant price change for January 2015 at this time. Because the Postal Service has announced price change proposals in September and October for the past three years, mailing industry representatives and others have been waiting to hear whether a price change would take effect in January 2015.

A rate hike, a decrease, an extension of the temporary "exigent" increase, and an even an increase and decrease a few months apart are all plausible 2015 scenarios for First Class, Standard, and Periodicals mailers. That uncertainty is a far cry from the past few years, when "market-dominant" postal rates inched up each January based on the rate of inflation.

The three-judge panel considering an appeal of the exigency case seems unlikely either to eliminate the rate hike or to make it permanent, according to Stephen Kearney, executive director of the Alliance for Nonprofit Mailers.