Mailers OK With USPS Rural Post Office Plan

At least one mailer group welcomed the U.S. Postal Service’s plan to reduce hours and services at rural post offices around the country.

“The Direct Marketing Association is pleased that USPS has created a plan that would meet both the postal retail needs of Americans living in rural areas and the needs for mailers to eliminate excess capacity,” said Jerry Cerasale, senior vice president of government affairs. “We urge USPS to monitor implementation of the plan to insure that the estimated savings are realized.”

Part of the USPS plan calls for keeping individual ZIP Codes and community identities intact even though post office hours and staff would be reduced.

This scheme could conceivably help keep intact the USPS’s Every Door Direct Mail program which encourages small local businesses to use mail instead of electronic alternatives. In the past year, the postal service has made $153 million from this venture.

Mailers have long thought the USPS was oversized and inefficient.

Earlier this year, some catalogers favored reducing USPS operational capacity and workforce to keep it going.

Late last month, mailers expressed lukewarm approval for a Senate postal reform bill that might forestall financial calamity for the USPS even though this bill did not call for closing any postal facilities.

This might all go for naught since this Senate bill must be reconciled with a harsher House bill proposed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) that so far has still not been put up for debate and may not be before the Presidential Election in November.

Obviously, the USPS caved into predictable political pressure and scuttled its plans to close an unspecified number of postal facilities around the country and came up with this latest plan for reducing services at rural post offices.

If the USPS’s plan goes forward as written, it would save an estimated $500 million a year when it’s fully implemented by 2014. This could make a dent in the USPS’s financial picture.  The postal service lost $3.2 billion during the three months ended March 31 and is expected to keep losing $25 million a day as it continues to warn of coming insolvency.

But the Postal Regulatory Commission must sign off on this latest USPS’s plan, says the postal service.

As these stories unfolded, we heard some knee-jerk calls privatizing the postal service and running it like a business instead of treating as probably the oldest and most trusted American governmental institution.

Thankfully, there are certain things the public, let alone the industry, just plain won’t stand for—we hope.