The Europeans Are Coming!

The U.S. Postal Service has stopped poking its finger into the eye of domestic competitors by abandoning the use of comparative advertisements.

While these ads were very successful, they also were extremely controversial-the business equivalent of negative political campaigning. Federal Express made the ads a subject for judicial challenge and the centerpiece of some of its more recent lobbying on Capitol Hill. People are wondering whether the postal service has lost its stomach for a competitive fight.

According to senior postal officials, however, the change is born more of an awareness that the real competitive threat to the postal service’s leadership in domestic mail delivery is coming from abroad.

For instance, Deutsche Post has been on a postal buying spree that would make even a Microsoft blush. The about-to-be-privatized German post office clearly intends to position itself through its DHL subsidiary and other units to become the West’s premier international shipper.

The Dutch post office, largely through its TNT Express business, also has established an American beachhead in the international shipping and overnight express markets. Through its investment in the American company Mail 2000 (a specialist in electronic-to-hard-copy hybrid mail), the Dutch appear poised to step into any breach made legislatively in the postal service’s letter-mail monopoly.

And, if you’ve been following the debate in the United Kingdom over Royal Mail’s future, the Brits don’t want to be cut out of international markets. Royal Mail already has established partnerships with some of America’s foremost printing and publishing companies.

We’re being invaded. The only question now is how much tolerance our legislators will have to grant the world’s largest postal service a freer hand to reshape the American postal market competitively rather than through imposed restraints.