On Tuesday, April 9, 2024, the USPS filed its Notice of Market-Dominant Price Change with the PRC. As predicted in the March 25 issue of Mailers Hub News (login required), the Postal Service is seeking the maximum possible increase the rate authority will allow. As stated in the filing, “The Postal Service has available approximately 7.8 percentage points of pricing…
Read More
As regular readers know, the Postal Service’s ongoing measures to implement elements of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s 10-Year Plan seldom are revealed directly to ratepayers or commercial mail producers. Rather, because of contractual obligations, information about facility changes and other matters having a potential impact on unionized employees is presented to the labor groups. In turn, that information is often…
Read More
Ratepayers and commercial mail producers have long expressed concern over the negative effects of the aggressive price increases being pursued by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and his supporters on the Board of Governors. If one recent development is any indication, these concerns may finally be motivating similar expressions of concern by legislators. Familiar concerns As reported September 9 by Keep…
Read More
In an August 14 filing with the Postal Regulatory Commission, the Greeting Card Association moved for the issuance of an official information request as part of the Public Inquiry on Changes Associated with the Delivering For America Plan (Docket No. PI2023-4). Motion and opposition The GCA explained the reasons for its motion: “The DfA plan depends pervasively on certain projections.…
Read More
This article and more can be found in the August 28, 2023 issue of Mailers Hub News Late on Friday, August 11, the Postal Service submitted a request to the Postal Regulatory Commission seeking approval for a negotiated service agreement with Publishers Clearing House. Though the USPS files NSA requests many times a week, the August 11 filing was different…
Read More
The Bureau of Labor Statistics March 14 release of the Consumer Price Index for February supplied the final figure needed to calculate the CPI-based portion of the pricing authority that will be available to the Postal Service for its anticipated April filing: 3.406%. Part one The agency’s CPI-based rate authority resets to zero after every price filing, so the size…
Read More
Continuing steps to move to a more battery-powered delivery fleet, the Postal Service announced on February 28 that, “after a competitive search,” it had awarded a contract to Ford Motor Company for 9,250 Ford E-Transit Battery Electric Vehicles. However, the agency conditioned starting delivery of the trucks, planned for December, on the “successful completion of the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement…
Read More
In consecutive filings with the Postal Regulatory Commission on February 10, the Postal Service revised two of its competitive product categories, continuing its ongoing restructuring of package services overall. First-Class Package Service In the first filing (docketed as CP2023-113), the USPS announced it will rename First-Class Package Service as “USPS Ground Advantage,” raise its weight limit to seventy pounds, and…
Read More
In an order issued January 25, the Postal Regulatory Commission gave each side of an ongoing argument a little of what it wanted. Accounting The issue at hand is simple: how the USPS should account for the $59.6 billion in “prefunding” obligations forgiven by the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 enacted last April. The answer to that question would…
Read More
Postal Service accounting is, to say the least, complex. Not only does it have to measure “institutional” costs – like maintaining the USPS Headquarters building – and “attributable” costs – like the manual distribution of Periodicals flats – but it also has to divide those costs between the market dominant products and competitive products. A core statutory requirement is that…
Read More