Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

Despite all the talk of restructuring and downsizing at the U.S. Postal Service, its labor costs have hardly budged in the past year. With employees working more overtime and relatively few retiring, the agency’s cost of salary and benefits inched down by barely 1 percent during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2011. So far this (calendar) year, the decline is a paltry 0.2 percent lower than the same time last year. In contrast, USPS projects that its revenues will decrease nearly 3 percent this fiscal year.

One barrier to cost cutting is a slowing attrition rate. In the Postal

For years, a likely voter’s mailbox on a Saturday before an election has been among the most contested public spaces in American political life, and the disappearance of that one day from the calendar could trigger a series of subtle but important shifts in the tactics of last-minute campaign communication.

Indeed, the elimination of Saturday delivery threatens to disrupt a golden era for political mail. Thanks to the mail’s precision and universality, no other format for political communication has been so good at exploiting the analytical innovations that have reshaped modern campaigns. Refinements in individual-level targeting have made brochures the most

Many weekly magazines deliberately try to reach subscribers in time for the weekend, when there's more time for reading—and shopping trips that might wind up reflecting advertisers' suggestions. Losing Saturday would delay many copies until Monday, when the competition for time and attention is stiffer.

Time magazine changed its schedule four years ago expressly to become a weekend read, and enough copies arrive on Saturdays that the Postal Service proposal would mean many subscribers don't see copies until Monday. "If the postal schedule changes, we will explore all options to maintain pre-weekend delivery," a Time staffer said.

As the postal drama continues to unfold, printers and mailers are mindful of their obligation to continue providing customers with maximized printing and postage savings. That won’t change, regardless of what the USPS looks like in five or 10 years.

The U.S. Postal Service’s reach into every state and congressional district is a big reason why Americans shouldn’t expect Congress to make the drastic changes that the postmaster general says are needed for the service to survive—especially before the 2012 election.

Proposals to cut Saturday service and close underused post offices in order to save billions of dollars have met united opposition from Democrats and many of the conservative Republicans who swept into office campaigning on smaller government.

Cornell University associate professor Richard Geddes compared efforts to save the postal service to the closures of under-used military bases. In concept, lawmakers support

George Will is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political commentator who has penned some of the most beautiful prose ever written about baseball. But yesterday, in opining about the U.S. Postal Service, he whiffed when it came to basic fact checking. After a fascinating history lesson about how Sunday mail delivery was discontinued a century ago, Will threw this clunker into his commentary for the The Washington Post:

“Surely the government could cede this function to the private sector, which probably could have a satisfactory substitute system functioning quicker than you can say ‘FedEx,’ ‘UPS’ and ‘Wal-Mart.’ The first two are good

“If passed today, either bill would provide at best one year of profitability, and at least a decade of steep losses,” said Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe. “Unfortunately, both bills have elements that delay tough decisions and impose greater constraints on our business model.”

Although the contracts with the National Association of Letter Carriers, AFL-CIO and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union, AFL-CIO expired at midnight Sunday, the Postal Service and the two unions agreed to extend the negotiations deadline until Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2011 at midnight.

Problems within the U.S. Postal Service have led to local postal carriers being forced to deliver mail late into the night and supervisors allegedly ordering the dumping of bulk mail at the Redondo Beach (CA) Main Post Office. Photographs taken Monday morning by Easy Reader staff at the Redondo Beach Main Post Office appear to confirm these allegations. The photos show recycling bins and trash bins filled with bundled mail—specifically, the Local Values advertising mailer issued by the Los Angles Times Media Group and the PennySaver USA advertising mailer.

Carriers say that reduced staffing, mail route consolidations, and confusion resulting from

For decades, this massive operation ran fairly smoothly, expanding along with the country and taking advantage of the new technologies brought about by railroad and flight. Mail volume increased from 50 billion pieces in 1953 to 75 billion in 1966. Even so, the postal service often ran deficits. Its mandate of universal mail access almost ensured that it would go in the red. By the middle of the 20th century, the postal service was losing $600 million a year, and that's when the system starting breaking down.

In 2006, Congress passed a law requiring an annual prepayment of retiree health