Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

The U.S. Postal Service could save about $1 billion annually by closing nearly 10,000 postal facilities that house both retail and carrier functions, according to a study released today. A plan presented by the USPS’s Office of Inspector General would mean fewer clerks and postmasters, but increased labor costs for letter carriers.

“The greatest opportunities for facility consolidation are with the highest-density ZIP Codes where the space per route is high and other units are nearby,” the report says. That’s in apparent contrast to the Postal Service’s own approach to closing post offices, which critics claim overwhelmingly focuses on sparsely populated

Lawmakers returned to Washington, DC, this week with a packed agenda. Topping the list of priorities is hammering out final details of a stopgap spending measure to keep the government running. Amid the election-year politicking, the list of unfinished business also includes legislation to restructure the financially ailing U.S. Postal Service.

The Senate approved a postal reform bill in the spring. However, the House version, which takes a very different tack to returning the USPS to solvency, has languished.

That has prompted Rep. Darrell Issa...to propose including an interim postal reform package in the CR to be introduced this week.

USPS delivered fewer than 139 mail pieces per work hour in July, a 3.7 percent decrease from the July 2011 level of 144 pieces, according to preliminary numbers the service released Tuesday. The agency’s net loss for the month was $1.327 billion, nearly $300 million more than planned and more than $500 million worse than last year.

The productivity trend for the full fiscal year (starting October 1) isn’t much better. USPS has delivered 143 pieces per work hour so far in FY2012, down 2.5 percent from the same 10 months of FY2011.

Mail volume declined more than 4 percent.

The POSTPlan reflects a determination by the Postal Service to explore options to adjust its retail window hours without closing post offices. Retail window hours of operation at more than 13,000 post offices nationwide will be reduced to six, four, or two hours per weekday, and in approximately 73 locations, hours of operation will increase.

The Newspaper Association of America is stunned by the Postal Regulatory Commission’s decision to approve an anti-competitive and damaging negotiated services agreement between the U.S. Postal Service and Valassis Direct Mail. “NAA believes this decision is contrary to law, and will challenge it immediately and vigorously in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,” said NAA Chairman James M. Moroney III.

Exactly why House Republican leaders chose not to act on any postal reform legislation before autumn is still a bit of a mystery. But last week’s Dead Tree Edition article on the subject stirred up plenty of theories and heated comments.

Amidst all the vitriol and conspiracy theories, seven additional interesting and sometimes insightful theories emerged to explain the GOP's inaction on the growing postal crisis:

1) Why bail out Obama?
2) All pain, no gain.
3) No consensus.
4) Let it fail.
5) The real GOP plan is privatization.
6) If you can’t retire them, scare them off.
7) Who cares?

Congressional Republicans seem intent on letting the U.S. Postal Service run out of cash, but even the pundits can't figure out exactly why. Republican leaders in the House refused to say why they have failed to bring either of two bill up for votes, but here are a few of the choicest theories:

• Fear: House Speaker John Boehner is perhaps “afraid voters would blame his members for the closing of underused post offices,” wrote Gail Collins, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times.

• Avoiding embarrassment: “Most likely, there’s not enough support in the House to pass any bill,

The Postal Service’s 2012 Holiday Mobile Shopping Promotion will offer online merchants an upfront 2 percent postage discount on Standard Mail and First-Class Mail letters, flats and cards that include a mobile barcode or print/mobile technology—such as a QR code—that can be read or scanned by a mobile device and leads the mail recipient to a mobile-optimized shopping website.

Talk of early-retirement incentives for U.S. Postal Service employees may have temporarily backfired: Career employees of the U.S. Postal Service have apparently been retiring in record-low numbers. The number of full-time employees shrank by only 1.6 percent in the past year, according to a statistical report USPS released Friday.

That’s a minuscule net attrition rate in an organization that is hardly hiring any new full-time employees, where half the employees are 50 or older, and where nearly half the employees are eligible to retire.

The net loss of only 8,141 full-timers between June 2011 and June 2012 is a far

Even before the Postal Service begins closing hundreds of processing centers to cut costs, several businesses say they are beginning to see a decline in service. In Wisconsin, Publisher’s Diversified Mail Service, a direct marketing firm that sends out 50 million to 75 million pieces of mail a year, said there had been delays in getting promotions delivered on time.

Last year, Time Inc. complained to the postal authorities after subscribers reported significant delays in getting their copies of Sports Illustrated, People and Time.

The post office says several factors have led to what it calls minor delivery delays: