Good Money After Bad? Mailers Try to Block FSS Expansion

Monday, April 18, 2016 Where the U.S. Postal Service sees an opportunity to expand the Flats Sequencing System to more ZIP codes, mailers see a backdoor rate increase. Postal officials recently told mailing-industry representatives that declining volumes and some equipment upgrades are creating excess capacity for the FSS. At a meeting of the Mailers Technical…

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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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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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Northrop Escapes FCA Suit Over Botched $874M USPS Order

Law360, New York (September 10, 2014) — A Virginia federal judge has agreed to dismiss a False Claims Act suit accusing Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. of misleading the U.S. Postal Service and failing to meet benchmarks in delivering worth $874 million. U.S. Judge T. S. Ellis III agreed with Northrop’s memorandum that no evidence exists that…

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