The USPS Board of Governors has approved the cessation of Saturday mail delivery. (Copy & paste this link: http://directmag.com/news/BOG-five-day-delivery-0324/ )
While the BOG requires Congressional approval for this change, it will most likely be given, in the face of a $3.1 billion dollar shortfall. At a time when the country will be coming to grips with the trillion dollar healthcare bill, a billion saved is a billion earned.
Most businesses will not protest the change. Many are Monday-Friday offices anyway and only retailers and small business will be marginally affected.
But where do you draw the line? The Post Office is requesting this change due to the reduced volume of mail. The real culprit here is that USPS costs are out of line with current and projected volumes. If you, as a business owner, had too many employees for the amount of work, what would you do?
The root of this problem, and had been for the past fifteen years, is labor costs. According to the USPS site, there are 550,000 career employees. What does this mean to you and me? That the post office cannot reduce its workforce without long, prolonged negotiations for fear of a total shutdown of delivery services.
Back in the '90's, I was employed by a large catalog retailer. Postal costs were our single largest expense and one over which we had no control. As the rates for postage increased, we took on more of the sorting, at our printer's facility, to deliver our mail deeper into the system, as a cost-savings method. So, rather than dump the mail in Lynchburg, VA, we trucked the mail, at our expense, to Sectional Center Facilities (SCF's) all over the country, to drop the sorted mail for those regions.
Another trick we employed was to reduce the weight of the catalog itself. This became a constant game of reducing the weight of the paper, on which the catalog printed. The paper manufacturers were experimenting with all sorts of ways to reduce basis weight, while still providing a good, printable substrate. Still, quality suffered. Magazines (remember them?) suffered from this reduction of print quality as well.
One final option was to reduce the physical dimensions of the catalog, as a means of reducing the weight of the book. Little by little, over a period of years, we shaved a quarter of an inch here, an eighth of an inch there. And pretty soon, our catalogs had shrunk to a size that was a less effective promotional vehicle. When do you actually fall off the cliff? It's hard to say, but we slowly nudged ourselves closer to the requirement to find a lower cost alternative to the USPS.
So, first we lose Saturday delivery. Letter writers will decry this change as they no longer can look forward to a missive, bon mots or other mail on the weekend. But guess what? Your Grandmother's on Facebook (she is). And if she's not there yet (she will be!), she is certainly using email (and E-cards) now as a replacement for letter mail.
Instead of resolving the problem with its cost structure, the post office has decided to degrade the service they're providing. And it's a sure start down the path towards the end of mail delivery. It will be interesting to see where this all ends. Privatization anyone? It remains to be seen.
