Posted on 03/20/2012 4:51:11 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
The U.S. Postal Service wants small businesses to send more direct mail, a.k.a. junk mail, to help the beleaguered agency expand its revenue stream by hundreds of millions of dollars.
In a campaign called "Every Door Direct Mail," the Postal Service is touting a year-old online tool to help small businesses micro-target direct mail. The Web tool allows firms to tap customers by neighborhood or zip code without names or addresses.
The Postal Service reported a $5.1 billion loss for the year ended Sept. 30. The loss was caused by an ongoing decline in its core revenue driver, regular letters and bills known as first-class mail, as well as a legal mandate that the agency prefund health care benefits for a legion of future retirees.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
Type means letter, flat, parcel, sprl (Small parcels and rolls). Class means what rate category it was entered as ~ to wit, Preferential (First-Class, Express, Priority, Periodicals ~ in part) or Non Preferential (Standard, Parcel Rate, etc.)
The names vary over time of course ~ always some new idea.
Then there's the indicia ~ stamped mail, permit imprint, metered, and franked.
Once you know the handling characteristics of each, as well as the rules regarding minimum quantities required for entry and how those quantities must be pre-sorted, then you get an idea of what costs a lot, what costs less, what can be handled such that the "next handling pieces" are essentially profitable.
Direct Mail Advertising is typically entered at the Standard Rate in letters and flats.
DMA is the big money machine for USPS. The requirements are enormous to qualify to enter mail at that rate, so the mailers' work before mailing squeezes most of the costs out of the category.
Automation has also whacked postal costs tremendously
Unfortunately the USPS did not realize much of the productivity improvement because it didn't lay off unused labor. Most of that problem was hidden under the ever increasing mail volumes.
If they'd "right sized" the labor force they'd been hiring many of them back a year or two later ~ in a normal economy. Management was always too timid to do that.
The Great Obama Recession has forced the issue. USPS now has to lay off the surplus folks.
At the same time USPS continues to handle half the mail in the world.
Please see my post #20.
“The U.S. Postal Service wants small businesses to send more direct mail”
Go to hell. I’m every bit as sick of junk mail as I am with spam email or I was with telemarketers.
Hey Postal Service, get some connections to the big banks and government insurance racket, and they’ll mandate us to pay for whatever you want, or be fined.
Always a comedian.
I know that postage is a user fee. That was exactly my point.
To clarify, in case you were reading fast, I said (in my original post) I wanted to raise the postage and fund by user fee (the postage), in contrast to “bailing them out” (through other taxes, or worse, continued money printing).
The problem for business regarding junk mail isn’t just the cost of postage...its the printing and handling costs on top of that that are prohibitive. Businesses are beginning to figure out that if they can advertise via the internet they eliminate both the postage and printing/handling costs.
Now, about the drive-by traffic ~ how do you get to them? Those are customers who hadn't thought about the product you want to sell them, but there it is, in the advertisement you just had delivered to their homes!
So, yes, printing is costly. Not getting your customers' attention is more costly!~
Get a P.O. Box, have mail to your home discontinued, pull up your mailbox.
I’m getting tons of junk mail already, all of it from parties, PACs, and politicians begging for money.
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