May 10, 2013
With revenues ticking up slightly, the Postmaster General and his CFO say reform could make the Postal Service profitable again.
May 01, 2013
Concerning the future of the USPS, one thing is abundantly clear: It is going to change, sooner rather than later, and in significant fashion.
April 25, 2013
The coauthor of last year's failed bill tells a postal conference to expect passage of a bipartisan act this summer.
April 10, 2013
Bulk mailers can now feel free to set their summer and fall delivery schedules, but worries fester over a looming rate increase.
January 20, 2012
The embattled U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is continuing its struggle to stay in the black, but the five-month moratorium on facilities closures may end more than a month before the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) releases an advisory opinion on its streamlining plans.
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has been granted permission by the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) to allow direct mailers to pay postage via credit rather than requiring prepayment, said PRC chairman Ruth Goldway on Jan. 6. The new rules went into effect Jan. 5.
A postal reform bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate on Sept. 23, seeking to help the ailing U.S. Postal Service (USPS) with the establishment of two new control boards. One would oversee a kind of receivership for the USPS if it defaults on any of its government payments and the other is intended to prevent politics from influencing plans to reduce the USPS processing infrastructure.
Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said Monday that he had to nudge his in-house and agency marketing team towards the ad campaign that the US Postal Service will use this fall to show off the effectiveness of mail as a marketing tool. "They said 'mail's not sexy,'" Donahoe told reporters at the National Postal Forum 2011 in San Diego on May 2.
The Postal Regulatory Commission said March 24 that the US Postal Service overestimated its potential savings and underestimated potential lost revenues in its proposal to move to five-day-per-week home delivery. The commission's five members issued varying opinions on the plan to cut Saturday delivery, which Congress is expected to debate this session.
November 01, 2010
Ruth Goldway, chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission, sheds light on USPS's current challenges
The Postal Service said today that it would appeal the Postal Regulatory Commission's (PRC) September 30 ruling that denied the Postal Service's exigent price increase.
Catalog mailers and magazine publishers are bracing for sizable postage price increases in January 2011, when the US Postal Service expects to implement an "exigent" price increase on mailing services.
The US Postal Service's $1.6 billion net loss in the second quarter of its 2010 fiscal year was a year-over-year improvement of about $300 million. Despite beating agency forecasts for the quarter, the organization is on track to lose nearly $7 billion this fiscal year, which ends September 30.
Trade groups the Direct Marketing Association and the American Catalog Mailers Association pledged to work together on postal issues on March 11.
One of the questions that President Barack Obama tackled yesterday in a YouTube town hall regarded a theoretical privatization of the US Postal Service. His response: privatization of public services is "a bad idea most of the time."
The Postal Regulatory Commission wants to hear from members of the public about the US Postal Service's financial future. The group will hold a public forum on February 10 in Washington, DC, on the organization's business plan for the future.
The current system of funding the US Postal Service's Civil Service Retirement System pension responsibility has resulted in the agency overpaying $75 billion from 1972 to 2009 to its pension fund, according to the Postal Service's Office of Inspector General.
The US Postal Service has decided not to raise first-class rates for 2010. Four direct mail experts divulge their top recommendations for taking advantage of the break in rate increases.
Although the US Postal Service has promised to drive down its own spending, a report released this month by its own inspector general's office found that agency's employees spent $792,000 on meals and events without justification in late 2008 and the first half of 2009. The USPS disclosed a net loss of $3.8 billion for fiscal year 2009.
A coalition of postal, mailing and marketing groups launched a Web forum on December 1 to bolster discussion about the state of the US Postal Service and how the federal agency can maintain its relevance. The goals of PostalJournal.com are to explore the evolution of the USPS as part of the nation's economic and communications infrastructure and to create an exchange of ideas about the industry.
The US Postal Service floated a trial balloon this week about possibly selling advertising space on the sides of its trucks. Yet the USPS' Inspector General's Office acknowledged a number of potential roadblocks in a blog post on the issue.
The president of the National Association of Letter Carriers has urged Congress to take up a long-term fix for the US Postal Service's retiree funding issues. The agency had been charged with spending $5.4 billion on payments to the fund this year.
The Atlantic's Daniel Indiviglio reacted to the US Postal Service's November 16 announcement that it lost $3.8 billion during fiscal year 2009 by saying that cutting Saturday service "is a pretty reasonable idea."
John Potter, postmaster general and CEO of the US Postal Service, used the open session of the November 13 USPS Board of Governors meeting to press again for structural reform of the agency, insisting that real reform must reduce the number of delivery days from six to five per week.
According to suggestions published by Newsweek on October 5, the US Postal Service should "give every American an e-mail address when they're born," according to futurist Watts Wacker, and then sell advertising on those accounts. The agency could also advertise its services with coupons or oversee government-expanded broadband, according to the list of seven suggestions.
In this week's edition of DMNews, direct mail experts said that post office branch closings won't have much of an impact on the direct marketing industry. However, processing and distribution centers could be another story altogether. The US Postal Service has announced the closing or downsizing of 15 of those offices and is considering the fate of others.
The US Senate approved legislation on September 30 that allows the US Postal Service to delay $4 billion in payments to a retirees' healthcare fund. The measure, passed by a 62 to 38 vote, was added to legislation that extends funding federal programs at current levels and raises Congress' budget by 6%. President Barack Obama is expected to sign the bill.
Thomas Schaller, a political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, wrote... in the Baltimore Sun this week that the US Postal Service is the wrong political football for conservative politicians and pundits to kick.
The Universal Postal Union, the intergovernmental network of national postal services, recently announced global implementation of a new tracking program for international letter mail as part of its Global Monitoring System. It hopes to enable post services around the world to improve delivery quality with improved metrics. The Tag Acquisition Processor (TAP) product, provided by mailing technology company Reva Systems, allows the UPU to track delivery times for every mail piece sent from one country to another through RFID tags automatically, rather than requiring manual barcode scans or active tracking.
An open session of the US Postal Service's Board of Governors will be held August 5 at USPS Headquarters in Washington, DC. Under discussion will be the latest financial and service performance of the agency.
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What's in our mailbox this month: fitness postcards from Retro Fitness, American Woman Fitness Centers, Union's United Taekwondo Academy, and Bally Total Fitness. (We're totally pumped.)
Social data can improve a brand's bottom line and customer relationships. Just ask brands Infiniti and Diamond Nexus.
Here are three must-have data sets that every marketer should include in his or her email strategy.
