There are days you’ve just got to wonder: How does the U.S. Postal Service go about making decisions? Take a look at how it’s planning to handle that segment of the mail stream consisting of larger than letter-size mail pieces (that is, flats).
Flats come in a variety of forms. Some as envelopes, others as perfect-bound catalogs or magazines, and still others as freestanding inserts, fliers and newspapers. Any marketer can tell you why mail pieces are produced to look as they do.
There are days, however, when you might be curious whether anybody at the USPS appreciates that the purpose of a commercial mailing is to generate market response, and not necessarily to make life easier for postal automation machines.
There was a time when the postal service welcomed and delivered mail pieces of all shapes and sizes. With most letter-size mail, that’s still true. But with flats it’s a different story.
Instead of building flat mail processing equipment to handle the variety of larger than letter-size pieces that marketers and publishers use, the USPS first determined what it deemed were “ideal” mail processing characteristics, and then built a machine to process that mail. For instance, the FSM 881 failed to handle many of the kinds of flats that were in circulation. In response, the postal service told mailers future machine designs would be more flexible. But then it came out with the FSM 100, which has only slightly greater flat-handling capabilities.
The approach the postal service’s operations mavens seem wedded to is what can be termed a Procrustean solution — one that disregards differences of any kind. Anything that can’t be squeezed into a postal Procrustean bed will have its head and limbs lopped off to force a fit. Of course, being the regulatory beast that it sometimes can be, the USPS will use mail acceptance regulations as the ax by which all flats are postal-qualified.
The postal cart is being placed before the horse — a dumb way to drive a cart, and not a very bright way to plan a postal business for the future.
It’s time the postal service joined with its “partners” (which most businesses call customers) to take a more rational perspective on what flats processing ought to be.
GENE A. DEL POLITO is president of the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) in Arlington, VA.
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