Recent Posts


	June 15, 2013 Newark's Lautenberg Post Office may be sold: Is the Senator rolling over in his grave? The General Services Administration (GSA) is looking to purchase the Frank L. Lautenberg Post Office and Courthouse in Newark, New Jersey, from the Postal Service. According to a GSA prospectus from April 2013, the GSA would “demolish the postal workspace for...
	June 13, 2013 USPS to Bronx: Drop dead — the GPO must go The Postal Service has decided to go ahead with the sale of the historic Bronx General Post Office. Tom Samra, Vice President of Facilities for the USPS, has issued his “Final Decision for Relocation of Retail Services in Bronx, New York.” (A copy...
	June 10, 2013 The Postal Service delivers the last mile, almost: Changing modes of delivery The Postal Service helps out FedEx and UPS by providing “last mile” delivery of their parcels, and two recent studies argue that the Postal Service should privatize its retail and mail processing networks and instead "concentrate on what it does best...
	May 30, 2013 Relocating the Peter Stuyvesant Post Office: What happened to partnering with the public? The Postal Service is shutting down New York City’s Peter Stuyvesant Station at 432 East 14th Street and relocating retail services about a block away. When it does a relocation like this, the Postal Service is supposed to follow section 241.4 of the Code...
	May 29, 2013 Fun with numbers: The Postal Service is losing $25 million a day, and other spurious memes Yesterday the Postal Service released its preliminary financial report for April 2013. The line on controllable operating expenses shows that the Postal Service basically broke even for the month. It lost $1 million — less than 0.02 percent of April's...
	May 21, 2013 New York’s Greeley Square Post Office gets a new location: Who knew? Greeley Square is a small triangular park in New York City, bounded by West 32nd and West 33rd Streets, and Broadway and Sixth Avenue. It’s a charming spot in a bustling area, with tables and chairs, a food kiosk, and a surprising number of trees for a small...
	May 9, 2013 The writing on the wall in Reading: The Postal Service pulls a fast one The Postal Service is putting another historic post office up for sale, and as usual it's showing little interest in hearing from the public or following the law. Selling off historic post offices isn't easy. Not only does the Postal Service need to...
	May 5, 2013 In bad faith: How the Postal Service is selling the Redlands post office This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Main Post Office on Brookside Avenue in Redlands, California. It's a downtown landmark, it's on the National Register of Historic Places, and it even has its own postal museum. Now the Postal Service is...
	May 1, 2013 Dismantling the legacy: More post office suspensions, relocations, and sales The Postal Service is continuing its push to dismantle the country's vast network of brick-and-mortar post offices. Post offices are being suspended over minor lease disputes, historic buildings are being sold to the highest bidder, and retail services are being...
	April 27, 2013 What's up in the Heights? The Postal Service relocates a post office, forgets to tell anyone Over the past few weeks, there have been several meetings in New York City about the Postal Service’s plans to close historic post offices and move retail services to smaller spaces. Not many people attended the first of them — about the Bronx General...
	April 22, 2013 Postal Vision 2020 looks at the future of "postal services" and sees privatization The third annual Postal Vision 2020 conference will take place this week in Washington, DC. The conference brings together speakers from a variety of backgrounds for what the Postal Vision website describes as a "provocative, candid conversation about what...
	April 15, 2013 Twenty Minutes at the PRC: Postal workers protest the plant consolidations Last week postal workers took the fight to stop the consolidation of mail processing plants to the nation’s capital. On Wednesday, April 10, employees representing several communities and APWU locals traveled to Washington, DC, to meet with their elected...
	April 13, 2013 Binding the nation together: Berkeley and the Bronx join forces to save the post office For our Founding Fathers, post offices and post roads played an essential role in “binding our nation together.” Congress reaffirmed that vision when it passed the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970: “The Postal Service shall have as its basic...
	April 10, 2013 USPS BOG backs off five-day delivery, may seek exigent rate increase The USPS Board of Governors announced today that it has decided not to go forward with the plan to end Saturday delivery on August 5, 2013. The press release is here. The Board acknowledged that the Continuing Resolution passed recently by Congress means that the...
	April 8, 2013 Mid-Hudson APWU Local files a Complaint with the PRC to halt the plant consolidations The Mid-Hudson Local of the APWU filed a Complaint today with the Postal Regulatory Commission requesting that the Commission order the Postal Service not to proceed with the consolidation of 55 mail processing plants that were previously scheduled for 2014. The Mid-...
	April 7, 2013 The Postmaster General clears up some mixed messages Postmaster General Donahoe gave one of his State of the Postal Service talks earlier this week. The PMG wanted clear up what he characterized as “mixed messages." Apparently there are folks out there — the media, the unions, postal workers,...
	April 3, 2013 We just want our mail: A maximum degree of no postal services in Francitas Francitas is a small town in south Texas. It’s had a post office since 1911, but no longer. The Postal Service isn’t interested in providing Francitas with a post office anymore, nor with much else either. Since 2011, the town has been hit with two...
	April 1, 2013 Privatizing the post office: The NAPA/Pitney Bowes study on reinventing the retail network About three weeks from now, postal insiders and innovative outsiders will convene in Washington DC for the PostalVision 2020/3.0 conference to discuss the future of the Postal Service. Called "Positioning America for the New Millennium,” the event will...
	March 31, 2013 Not so good Friday in Freistatt: Post office closed on two days’ notice The post office in Freistatt, Missouri, closed today — on two days’ notice to customers. The Postal Service says it was unable to negotiate a lease renewal with the landlord, so it declared an emergency suspension. As usual in these cases, the...
	March 22, 2013 Is the plan to end Saturday delivery DOA? Two things happened yesterday that may have put the nail in the coffin on the Postmaster General’s plan to end Saturday delivery. First, Congress passed an appropriations bill that has a provision maintaining Saturday delivery, just as it’s done every year...
	March 22, 2013 Historic La Jolla Post Office headed for closure & sale Despite a very well organized resistance effort that's been going on for over a year, the Postal Service has decided to go ahead with the sale of the historic post office on 1140 Wall Street in La Jolla, California. The final decision to relocate retail services...
	March 19, 2013 Postal Service looks to close five large New York City Post Offices Five large post offices in New York may be closed over the coming months. Most likely, retail services will be relocated to smaller spaces in the neighborhood, and several hundred letter carriers who work out of the back of the buildings will be transferred to other...
	March 15, 2013 Pitney Bowes funds a study to privatize the Postal Service, could make billions off the plan The National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) has just published a report about a proposal to create a "public-private hybrid" postal system. The full title is worth noting: “An Independent Review of  a Thought-Leader Concept to Reform the U.S...
	March 10, 2013 What are the USPS and CBRE up to? The case of the historic structure report on the Berkeley Post Office The fire sale of the country’s post offices seems to be picking up speed. Yesterday the Postal Service confirmed that it was in contract with a buyer for the 1858 post office in Georgetown, a historic neighborhood in Washington, DC. The sale of the New...
	March 8, 2013 Legacy for Sale: Historic Post Offices on the Market The New York Times has an excellent front-page article by Robin Pogrebin about the Postal Service’s push to sell off its historic post office buildings. It includes a great photo scroll, and it's getting lots of very lively comments. As the Times...
	March 6, 2013 A done deal in Derby: The Postal Service decides first, consults later, ignores the law On Monday, the Postal Service announced that “it is considering plans” to sell the historic post office in Derby, Connecticut. Such a sale requires a formal review process, and the Postal Service has taken the first steps in that process by informing city...
	March 3, 2013 Bailout BS: Darrell Issa’s Misinformation Campaign about the Postal Retirement Funds The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Congressman Darrell Issa, has a website entitled “Saving the Postal Service.” According to the website, “H.R. 2309, the Issa-Ross Postal Reform Act, is the only legislation that saves...
	February 27, 2013 January USPS Financials: $437 Million Loss or $261 Million Profit? Take Your Pick The Postal Service has released its financial statement for January 2013. Compared to January of last year, First Class revenues are down slightly less than 1%, while Standard Mail revenues are up 2.6%, Periodicals are up nearly 3%, and Packages are up over 4%. ...
	February 26, 2013 Leveraging intellectual property: Where's Mr. ZIP when you need him? Last week the Postal Service announced that it is partnering with Wahconah, a Cleveland-based clothing manufacturer, to develop a new line of "smart apparel" (also known as "wearable electronics") called “Rain Heat & Snow.” The...
	February 24, 2013 The Magical Postal Publicity Tour: Over 7,000 POStPlan Meetings, and Counting The Postal Service is plowing ahead with its community meetings on POStPlan. As of Friday, it had held 6,741 meetings, and it has scheduled an additional 474 through March 15. That’s a total of 7,215 meetings — well more than half the list of 13,000...
	February 24, 2013 New survey shows over 80 percent oppose ending Saturday delivery Last week, the Postal Service released a survey it had commissioned with IPSOS, a Paris-based market-research company, showing that 80 percent of Americans supported the Postal Service's decision to end Saturday delivery. Save the Post Office conducted its...
	February 20, 2013 The new USPS fashion line: Slideshow presentation
	February 18, 2013 It's Presidents' Day: The good, the bad, and the BOG BY MARK JAMISON On Wednesday, February 7, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe stood before members of the press and the American people to announce that the Postal Service would end Saturday mail delivery and collections in August. An announcement like this was...
	February 15, 2013 The Postal Service has a survey on ending Saturday delivery: So do we The Postal Service has just released the results of a survey it commissioned on its plan to end Saturday delivery. The Postal Service press release says the survey shows that 80 percent of Americans support the new delivery schedule. Before you take that...
	February 8, 2013 The Postal Service Q1 2013 financials — not bad, but Saturday delivery still must go The Postal Service has just released its 10-Q financial statement on the first quarter of the 2013 Fiscal Year (i.e., the last three months of 2012). Despite all the doom-and-gloom talk about its humongous deficit, the Postal Service had a decent first quarter. ...
	February 6, 2013 Nothing stays these couriers (except on Saturdays): The Postal Service moves to five-day delivery The Postal Service is going to stop delivering mail on Saturdays. The change will take place in August. The Postal Service will continue to deliver parcels and to PO boxes on Saturdays, but that's about it. The Postmaster General says the move is expected...
	Feb. 3, 2013 A Bronx Cheer for the Postal Service: The Fire Sale of Historic Post Offices Continues Earlier this week the Postal Service announced that it planned to sell the historic post office on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, New York. There's an excellent article about the post office by David W. Dunlap in Friday's New York Times. The Bronx...
	January 27, 2013 Coming sooner or later: An advisory opinion on modes of delivery A couple of days ago, residents of Vermont — and apparently other states across the country as well — received a letter from the Postal Service requesting that they convert from mailboxes at the side of their door to a mailbox along the road. The letter...
	January 18, 2013 The Postal Service shares some lists: Closures, Suspensions, VPOs, CPUs, and Retail Channels Yesterday the Postal Service provided the Postal Regulatory Commission with some lists and other material for the annual compliance report. They include the post offices that were closed and suspended during fiscal year 2012 (October 1, 2011 to September 30, 2012),...
	January 15, 2013 Killing the Post Office Softly: POStPlan implementation almost halfway done The Postal Service has already held over 5,400 community meetings for POStPlan, and it has scheduled another 860 for the rest of January and the first week of February. Within a few weeks, some 6,340 post offices will see their hours reduced to six, four, even two...
	January 14, 2013 At what price profit? The battle for the soul of the Postal Service BY MARK JAMISON The new year has begun, and the country is still waiting for Congress to address the problems facing the Postal Service. In the meantime, the Postmaster General blames the crisis on congressional inaction and the diversion of first class mail to the...
	January 10, 2013 Murderous Reform: A Plan to Privatize Postal Profits at Public Expense BY GRAY BRECHIN The National Academy of Public Administration has released a “Work-in-Progress” report entitled "Restructuring the U.S. Postal System: The Case for a Hybrid Public-Private Postal System." The Academy is now embarking on a study of...
	January 8, 2013 Constructively closed: The emergency suspensions continue The Postal Service continues to close post offices by emergency suspension over problems renegotiating leases. Many of the problems are caused by the Postal Service. A suspension is an easy way to close a post office — it avoids a lengthy...
	January 2, 2013 How the Postal Service began prefunding retiree health care and fell into a deep hole The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has just issued a new report (GAO-13-112) on the Postal Service’s retiree heath care fund. It’s called “Status, Financial Outlook, and Alternative Approaches to Fund Retiree Health Benefits.” ...
	December 21, 2012 One arrested as postal hunger strikers occupy Issa’s congressional office [Press release from Communities and Postal Workers United www.cpwunited.com] Five postal hunger strikers occupied the office of Representative Darrell Issa Thursday afternoon. “Issa needs to back off his campaign to wreck the postal service....
	December 3, 2012 A Complaint gives the PRC another crack at POStPlan The post office in Great Cacapon, West Virginia, is on the POStPlan list, and in January its hours will be reduced to six a day. A nonprofit organization named AdvoCare has filed a formal Complaint with the Postal Regulatory Commission challenging the Postal Service...
	November 26, 2012 Manufacturing Emergencies: An open letter to the PRC on post office suspensions BY MARK JAMISON [The following letter was recently sent to the Postal Regulatory Commission and Chairman Goldway in response to issues arising from the implementation of POStPlan.] Dear Chairman Goldway, I am writing to you directly but I hope you will share these comments...
	November 17, 2012 Nothing stays these couriers: Postal workers deliver during Sandy While nearly everything was shut down by Superstorm Sandy — airports, trains, subways, schools, businesses, and most of the federal government — the Postal Service was still up and running. Postal workers were still out there delivering the mail,...
	November 17, 2012 Network Rationalization Update, with detailed schedule of changes The Postal Service has published an updated list of the processing facilities that will be impacted by Phase 1-B of the Network Rationalization plan, which begins after the New Year. Phase 1-A was implemented this past summer. Though it was originally planned to...
	November 17, 2012 POStPlan becomes a reality: Hours cut at hundreds of offices today, thousands more after the holidays After nearly two years of planning — going back to early 2011, when the Postal Service first proposed changing the rules about staffing post offices without postmasters and redefining "consolidation" — today POStPlan became a reality. ...
	November 12, 2012 Holler for help: There's no stopping emergency suspensions According to a USPS service disruption report issued on November 10, over 330 post offices were impacted by Hurricane Sandy. About 120 were completely shut down, and another 30 had the retail operations suspended. Many of these offices remain closed,...
	November 7, 2012 POStPlan Implementation: 5,600 offices under review, hours to be reduced at 500 on November 17 The Postal Service has provided NAPUS with a list of post offices impacted by the first phase of the implementation of POStPlan. Some 13,000 post offices will be reviewed under POStPlan for reduced hours or discontinuance. The list provided to NAPUS contains...
	November 1, 2012 How the Postal Service foundered: Parceling out the responsibility BY MARK JAMISON Over the last several months the situation surrounding the fate of the Postal Service has become increasingly clear. How can that possibly be the case, when Congress has utterly failed in its efforts to pass postal reform legislation, when mail volumes...
	October 6, 2012 Ignorance, incompetence, favoritism, bullying, and obsession: Just another day at the Post Office BY MARK JAMISON On September 30, 2001, the management of the Postal Service published a document entitled Outline for Discussion: Concepts for Postal Transformation. As the title suggests, this document described the terms of future discussions about what the Postal...
	October 2, 2012 POST Plan meetings: Over 1500 scheduled already, more coming In order to implement POST Plan — the plan to reduce hours at 13,000 post offices — the Postal Service will be holding a public meeting at each impacted post office. The Postal Service has already scheduled 1,518 public meetings for the two-week period...
	October 1, 2012 The PRC's Advisory Opinion on Network Rationalization: Death Knell for the Postal Service? When the Postal Regulatory Commission issued its advisory opinion on the Retail Access Optimization Initiative (RAOI) last year, it said the plan to close 3,700 post offices wouldn’t optimize anything. On Friday of last week, the PRC issued its advisory opinion...
	September 18, 2012 Consternation and confusion: Putting POStPlan in place The Postal Service began implementing POStPlan a couple of weeks ago, and in a post last week we reported on problems that had already begun to emerge: surveys sent only to box holders, meetings scheduled during the workday, using the post office lobby as the meeting...
	September 11, 2012 POStPlan implementation: The surveys go out, the trouble begins Last week the Postal Service began notifying citizens across the country that their post office would either have its hours reduced or be closed completely. Reports from the field indicate that the Postal Service will not be rolling out POStPlan in a very gradual way...
	September 8, 2012 An Open Letter to Senator Collins: It's time for a new vision of the Postal Service [A few days ago, former postmaster Mark Jamison wrote a letter to Senator Susan Collins of Maine, urging her to exert her influence in Congress to change the direction of the Postal Service before it's too late. Mr. Jamison can be reached at Mij455@gmail.com...
	September 4, 2012 To NSA or not to NSA? The Valassis Question BY MARK JAMISON I would earnestly warn you against trying to find out the reason for and explanation of everything.... To try and find out the reason for everything is very dangerous and leads to nothing but disappointment and dissatisfaction, unsettling your mind and...
	August 27, 2012 Trouble ahead: The PRC gives POStPlan a green light Last Thursday, the Postal Regulatory Commission issued its advisory opinion on POStPlan, the Post Office Structure Plan, and the Postal Service isn't wasting any time implementing its plan to reduce hours at 13,000 post offices. On the same day the PRC published...
	August 21, 2012 On behalf of infrastructure: Rethinking the postal environment BY MARK JAMISON It's been four years since the Great Recession began to take its toll on postal revenues, and we appear no closer to a resolution to the crisis than when it first arose. Of course, if one looks at it from an historical perspective, the Postal...
	August 16, 2012 Dateline Danville VA: The VP visits, the USPS cuts hours at the PO On Tuesday of this week, Vice President Biden told a largely African American audience in Danville, Virginia, that Mitt Romney wanted to put them "back in chains" by "unchaining Wall Street." Republicans jumped on the VP for playing the race card...
	August 14, 2012 What can Brown do for you? Congressman Ryan's UPS Express Congressman Paul Ryan, who may be our next Vice President, hasn’t had much to say about the U.S. Postal Service. He has a statement on his website about the agency’s financial problems, but it basically just nutshells the bills put forward by Darrell Issa...
	August 13, 2012 Got Mail? Go get it — the Postal Service has other plans In its never ending search for ways to cut costs and reduce the deficit, the Postal Service may have come up with a real money-saver: stop delivering the mail. One of the biggest expenses incurred by the Postal Service is delivering the mail to your door or your curb....
	August 10, 2012 Postal Service posts a $5.2 gazillion loss, begs to be put out of its misery Yesterday the Postal Service released its Form Q3, the financial report for the third quarter of the fiscal year. The headlines wax poetic: “No more mail? US Postal Service begs Congress for help; warns it could go insolvent by next year” (NY Daily...
	August 6, 2012 The Road to POStPlan: Breaking down the postmaster retirement numbers Yesterday the Postal Service provided an update on how many postmasters have chosen to retire thanks to the $20,000 incentive offer. Nearly 3,800 retired as of July 31, and about 300 will be retiring at the end of August and September, bringing the total to 4,100....
	August 5, 2012 Another POStPlan post office hit with suspension, gets the fifth option The Postal Service has closed another POStPlan post office by emergency suspension. The Postal Service's reassurances to the Postal Regulatory Commission that it wouldn't be doing that don't seem to count for much. A few days ago, we noted the...
	August 3, 2012 By Default or Design: The Demise of the Postal Service BY MARK JAMISON, FORMER U.S. POSTMASTER Default. It’s an ugly and dangerous word. It gives the impression that the individual or enterprise attached to it has utterly failed. It implies defeat and irresponsibility. The news media use the word...
	August 2, 2012 Fork in the Road for POStPlan The Postal Service has assured the Postal Regulatory Commission on several occasions that it would not use lease problems or staffing issues to close POStPlan post offices by emergency suspension. Yet even before the implementation of POStPlan has officially begun,...