Few Postal Jobs Will Be Cut in 2016

Monday 23, 2015 Don’t look for any major downsizing from the U.S. Postal Service during the coming year: A new report indicates the postal workforce will remain stable through late 2016. The agency is projecting a 0.6% decrease in work hours during Fiscal Year 2016, according to an annual financial plan it released Friday. That…

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Prospects Dim for USPS Early-Retirement Offers

October 26, 2015 U.S. Postal Service employees waiting for incentives to retire early shouldn’t get their hopes up. “It is unclear if USPS will continue to use separation incentives to reduce the size of its career workforce,” says a new Congressional Research Service report, “U.S. Postal Service Workforce Size and Employment Categories, FY 1995-FY2014.” The…

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Judge Ridicules Change-of-Address Regulations

Wednesday, October 7, 2015 News flash: Even procrastinators and the forgetful notify their electric company when they move. Sitting in the dark and lacking refrigeration have a way of moving that chore to the top of one’s to-do list. But those same people often forget, or purposely avoid, submitting a change-of-address notice to the U.S….

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Mail Flats: Ending the Controversy Without Fixing the Problem

Monday, August 31, 2015 “Mail destinating in FSS zones . . . that had previously qualified for Standard Mail Carrier Route rates migrated to FSS rates in the Standard Mail Flats product,” the USPS explained. Translation: What had been called Standard Flats hasn’t become more efficient; it’s just that the definition of Standard Flats has…

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Is the Postal Service Primed for Amazon Prime Day?

July 11, 2015 Next Wednesday is Amazon Prime Day, a huge promotion that one postal expert predicts will overwhelm the U.S. Postal Service. Amazon is celebrating its 20th anniversary on July 15 with a one-day online shopping event that will offer “more deals than Black Friday” to members of Amazon Prime, including those who sign…

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U.S. Postal Shredder (USPS): Damaged Catalogs Spark New Business Idea

Catalogs are being damaged so frequently in the mail that one company has turned the problem into a new business venture. “A recent project involving a national catalog brand showed that 23 percent of the catalogs received by our field agents arrived in poor condition,” a US Monitor press release said recently. The company is…

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USPS Cost Cutting Ain’t Cuttin’ It, Mailers Group Says

February 9, 2015 From Flats Sequencing to Network Rationalization, many of the U.S. Postal Service’s recent cost-cutting programs have not been living up to the agency’s projections, a multi-industry mailers group says. Worse, the programs have shifted costs to mailers without apparently benefiting USPS, the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) wrote in a recent filing…

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Postal Service Starts Fiscal Year With a Bang

(November 24, 2014) Maybe it was the election. Maybe it was the economy. Maybe it was even a sign that an organization that was left for dead is bouncing back. Whatever the reason, the U.S. Postal Service revealed today it had a bang-up October, with domestic mail volume up nearly 7% over the same month…

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