Logistics

Postal Trendwatch – September 2016 Mail Use Study Illustrates Postal Service’s Shifting Role. Declines across categories of mail continue to cause gradual shifts to the U.S. Postal Service’s role in Americans’ everyday lives, according to data from the Service’s most recent Household Diary Study. Letter mail sent by households saw the steepest declines, hastening subsequent changes to the economics of the Postal Service’s business, because that product had previously posted the agency’s strongest transactional profits.
The U.S. Postal Service, a National – and Constitutional – Treasure The Lexington Institute’s Don Soifer has done some in-depth pieces on the U.S. Postal Service, including a recent one on the financial picture at USPS. I appreciate the opportunity to provide some additional perspective and information about this American treasure, which is based in the Constitution, is consistently rated the public’s most-trusted federal agency and delivers 47 percent of the world’s mail.
Collect on Delivery: $54 Billion in Unfunded Postal Retiree Health Benefits? But the really bad news is that the Postal Service also had $54.8 billion in unfunded retiree health benefit liabilities, according to the Office of Personnel Management (pensions comprise a separate unfunded liability, at $24.1 billion).
World’s Postal Leaders Scrutinize Reform Proposals From September 20 to October 7, postal officials from across the globe will gather in Istanbul, Turkey, to shape the future of the sector. The Universal Postal Union, the specialized United Nations agency for the postal sector, convenes a Universal Postal Congress every four years to set rules for international mail exchanges. The UPU will use the Istanbul World Postal Strategy as its roadmap for the work cycle from 2017-2020. The UPU says that this strategy centers on three goals: improving the interoperability of network infrastructure, ensuring sustainable and modern products, and fostering effective market sector functioning. The 2006 federal Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act mandates “unrestricted and undistorted competition” between national posts and private delivery companies and prohibits entering international agreements where competitive preference is given. It also requires making a clear distinction between governmental and operational responsibilities and assigns responsibility for foreign policy related to international postal and delivery services to the Secretary of State.
Practices of the U.S. Postal Service That Imply Anti-Competitive Behavior: Historical Parallels and Remedies Across Other Regulated Sectors As have previous government monopolies, the U.S. Postal Service has been engaging in a pattern of business practices that appear anti-competitive, leveraging postal law to enable it to gain impermissible advantages over the private sector at the expense of consumers. It is not unusual for government monopolies to utilize their monopoly advantages to compete in services already offered by the private sector. The regulator of the monopoly is normally charged by statute with preventing such abuses. Consumers of the Postal Service’s monopoly products and services have recently been required to pay increased costs, in terms of higher prices and clearly reduced quality of service. Other indicators, including cost coverage and service quality measures, also point to increased costs charged to monopoly consumers compared with consumers of competitive products.
Is Your Mailman (Unwittingly) a Drug Dealer? (From the Baltimore Sun) Securing our nation's borders against illegal entrants has become the most reverberant, and often most polarizing, rallying cry of the nation's recent political discourse. But a different kind of illegal threat entering this country every day is at lea ...
Quick Reference to the U.S. Postal Service The U.S. Postal Service is an independent federal agency that must deliver mail to all Americans according to a standardized pricing schedule. Despite a legally guaranteed monopoly on non-urgent mail and exclusive rights of access to Americans' mailboxes, USPS has struggled financially since the mid-2000s. Postal Service activities are predominantly financed through revenue from the sale of mail and postal services. Proceeds from borrowing, interest from investments, and limited appropriations from Congress for specific functions also provide additional revenue. In the first quarter of 2016, USPS posted its first operating profit in five years. But the agency's accounting practices are notoriously opaque to the public, obsfucating persistent financial and operational concerns that would be considered highly problematic in other sectors. The quarterly profit is widely viewed as an anomalous product of an accounting change to workers' compensation expenses tied to interest rates and a temporary "exigent" increase in rates provided by Congress as short-term fiscal relief. Federal legislation passed in 2006 imposes a price cap tied to the Consumer Price Index for all classes of mail within the postal monopoly (but not for competitive products).
Postal Service “Profits” are Nothing to Write Home About The Postal Service is behaving almost exactly as one would expect a government monopoly competing with the private sector to behave. The postal economics of the past, where the first-class mail cash cow can erase losses incurred delivering other types of mail, no longer apply. The Postal Service's present costs and future liabilities aren't going away. The agency needs to measure them honestly and transparently.
International Postal Update — April 2016 Postal Operators Worldwide Seek Competitive Edge from Technology Investments -- The U.S. Postal Service is investing heavily in major technology initiatives with a focus on improving delivery of its competitive package products. Over the past two years, it has replaced older Intelligent Mail Devices with more than 260,000 new handheld Mobile Delivery Devices (MDDs). The MDDs are single-device scanners with GPS capabilities that allow letter carriers to track package delivery in real time. Clerks scan packages when received, and letter carriers do the same when they are delivered to notify customers within minutes. Phase 1 of the rollout put more than 75,000 MDDs in the hands of letter carriers and cost $149 million between September and December 2014. Phase 2 distributed another 188,000 MDDs at a cost of $349 million through September 2015. A July 2015 audit report by the Postal Service’s Inspector General cited “common functionality issues” in need of improvement.
International Postal Update — January 2016 NEW REPORT: EUROPEAN POSTS OVERCHARGE CONSUMERS ON INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING International shipping within Europe can cost up to five times as much as domestic shipping, according to new research from Saint-Louis University in Brussels, Belgium, conducted ...
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