Associated Mail & Parcel Centers Blog

Nine Groups Testified; One Solution Presented

Being the last person to testify had its disadvantages, but at least it kept me in that hot room next to Chicago’s ruling Mayor Richard Daley’s office to listen to all the other testimonies and a political speech by Danny Davis.

With the muffled sound of unrelated protesters down the hall, appearing before the Postal Regulatory Commission concerning the USPS request to go to a five-day delivery schedule were seven organizations that had something to lose should this decision go forward with the PRC’s blessing, the Chicago Postmaster with non-committal comments, and one organization with a suggestion for a solution.

• Direct Marketing Business Director – Crate and Barrel needs his catalogs to arrive for consumers to shop and return goods on weekends, but could live with five-day if the increase in rates flattened out
• Senior VP Caremark Mail Pharmacies needs to get prescriptions to people on Saturday when they forget to order them in time
• RR Donnelley prints so many magazines that they do not have room to store a day’s worth of skids to be mailed
• Murray McMurray Hatchery has a delicate life cycle of baby chicks in his supply chain
• Calmark produces direct mail pieces whose customers need them to be there on Tuesday, mailed on Saturday
• Cadillac News has Saturday newspaper customers who would be confused if their paper was not delivered into their mail boxes

AMPC, the lone presenter with a possible solution was willing to accept five-day delivery if six-day delivery could be handled on a limited basis.  As long as PO Boxes were being serviced, Private Mail Boxes have to be serviced too, according to AMPC.  Serving Private Mail Boxes means delivery to up to 10,000 Commercial Mail Receiving Agents with the potential to deliver to 10,000,000 or more residential and business addresses at 0.1% of the cost.

Mailers and union representatives are one-by-one marching before the PRC claiming the inability to adapt, yet unwilling to accept a significantly higher postal rate.  As with all government programs, once we get them, they become so embedded in our activities that we cannot do without them (or so it seems).

• eBay is concerned about rural “disadvantaged sellers” losing a day of delivery forcing them to use FedEx or UPS
• A consumer rights organization is concerned about the late fees that low-income people of California would incur because they would not be able to pay at the last minute and have it move through the mail on Saturday
• A newspaper in Dallas needs Saturday delivery because that issue “includes the football scores.” Without the USPS it could not be delivered
• The postal worker’s unions see this as “the first step in the destruction of the Postal Service”
• Now that we can vote by mail, election officials are worried that voters will not get their ballots returned in time

It appears that the Postal Service, by delivering and picking up mail on Saturday has taken away America’s ability to plan ahead and adapt.

But will this proposal be an all-or-nothing five-day delivery or will it be something less than six-day universal delivery?

With the comments from the public saying it is OK with them if they don’t increase the price of a stamp, comments from the mailers saying that six-day delivery is significantly embedded in America’s commerce, with newspaper’s inability to find an alternate delivery method, with advocates worried that procrastinators will be disenfranchised,  and the Post Office saying that they need an emergency rate increase on January 1^st that will reduce the Market Dominate CPI-U related pricing formula to another shallow political promise, I believe that there is no way that five-day delivery will stand in its present form.

I doubt that getting this through a pro-union Congress in an anti-incumbent atmosphere is going to happen this year.