US Postal Service Woes: The FSS Slows, and the Red Ink Flows

For the third year in a row, productivity of the U.S. Postal Service's Flats Sequencing System declined in 2018 – with no end in sight to the money-losing machines’ troubles.

Hourly throughputs declined 5% during Fiscal Year 2018 and are 14% below where they were five years ago, the USPS reported recently in its Annual Compliance Report. Leakage – the proportion of mail that was supposed to be run on FSS machines but wasn’t – rose from 20.1% to 21.9%.