United States Postal Service

The Postal Service’s recent price cuts for big businesses that ship packages are already trickling down to the small fry, like eBay seller Joe Strader. And based on Strader’s reaction to the rates that took effect on Sunday (Sept. 7), a lot of other small shippers will be switching their business to the U.S. Postal Service as well.

The proprietor of the eBay store Joe’s Surplus and Salvage noted a change he made this week on an item he ships frequently.

"In the past this would have been all FedEx but Priority Mail beats them with the discount."

Postmaster General and CEO Patrick R. Donahoe gave an upbeat assessment of the opportunities facing the mailing industry in a recent state of the business address to postal customers. "We are enhancing our products and services based on a much stronger data and technology platform, and that is driving a lot of exciting opportunities for America’s marketers and businesses," he said.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has joined an effort to block the U.S. Postal Service from closing dozens of processing centers, increasing the odds of a congressional debate over postal operations this month.

Reid joined a letter sent last month by 50 other senators urging senior Senate appropriators to include a one-year moratorium on postal closures in any stopgap deal to fund the government.

Reid’s backing of the efforts to stop the shuttering of mail processing facilities adds another wrinkle to those negotiations.

The U.S. Postal Service recently reported having 616,025 active employees, just 362 fewer than a year ago. The number of full-timers actually inched up by 1,464, to 467,844. That’s a far cry from the previous six years, when the annual workforce reductions ranged from 13,000 to nearly 53,000.

Downsizing of the postal workforce seems likely to resume soon, however. USPS is moving forward with a plan to close about 80 processing centers in the next few months, which could lead to a reduction of 15,000 jobs. A recent effort to block the plan in Congress has apparently fizzled out.

The stage is being set this month for another round of argument and angst over the future of the U.S. Postal Service when Congress returns to work in September.

The latest squabble erupted after the USPS, which this summer reported a net loss of $2 billion in the second quarter of 2014, announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs and consolidate 82 mail-processing centers in 2015. The Postal Service has already consolidated 141 mail-processing facilities since 2012.

The USPS continues to drown in red ink, despite an increase in revenue in the quarter ending June 30. A big part of the losses stem

The rise of online purchasing is boosting the partnership between United Parcel Service and the U.S. Postal Service—and fueling their rivalry as well.

“During the quarter, a retail customer upgraded its catalog distribution to UPS Ground from the U.S. mail, contributing to our ground growth,” CFO Kurt Koehn said during the company’s quarterly earnings call. He didn’t name names, but only a large customer could cause meaningful growth in the company’s $6.2 billion quarterly revenue for domestic ground shipments.

The big shipping company is also wary of the Postal Service trying to steal market share with its recent proposal to slash prices

Does the USPS stand to gain from 3-D printing? That's the question the agency sought to answer in a report it commissioned, published earlier this month, that explored the effects of 3-D printing on the distribution of physical packages. The highly speculative report is peppered with coulds: 3-D printing "could have major implications for everyone along existing supply chains;" it "could lead to more single-item parcels being shipped to consumers over shorter distances."

Even if the USPS could act nimbly enough to take advantage of this technology, it’s probably the case that the additional revenue wouldn’t be a cure-all.

Because USPS has to deliver to every home six days a week, it can deliver a package to that home cheaper than FedEx, which only delivers to that home when it receives enough profit to do so. Maybe that’s why FedEx earned more than $2 billion in profit last year while USPS lost nearly $5 billion.

Like UPS, FedEx complained that secrecy surrounding USPS’s “Competitive Products” makes it impossible to prove that USPS’s proposal is contrary to law.

UPS and FedEx also agree that USPS’s Competitive Products should bear more than 5.5 percent of the agency’s institutional costs now that they represent

Staples Inc. said it will end a pilot program with the U.S. Postal Service to set up mini-post offices in the company's retail outlets, after several protests outside the stores.

Postal workers have protested the program for months, objecting to expanding post office services to Staples stores, staffed with non-union workers.

The news comes days after the American Postal Workers Union won the support of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) after it approved a resolution to boycott Staples.

The imminent 3-D printing revolution "might be a huge opportunity for the U.S. Postal Service," an in-depth study says. But, as usual with the USPS, where there are opportunities there are also caveats and hurdles.

First, let's dig through the study, which was released this week by the USPS Office of Inspector, to answer some basic questions about 3-D printing and what it might mean for the Postal Service. Then we'll examine some of the challenges.

The most likely scenario is that 3-D printing will increase USPS’s commercial package volume by 18 percent, which would translate to $485 million annually