Yesterday the Postal Service posted its Form 10-Q financial report for the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2016 (Oct. 1, 2015 – Dec. 31, 2015). Thanks to a brisk package business during the holiday season, the Postal Service had plenty of good news to report. The financial report shows that the growth in e-commerce is more than making up for the … Read More
How the Postal Service sold Richmond’s Saunders Station PO for a song
Back in October 2015, the Postal Service sold the historic 1937 Saunders Station post office in Richmond, Virginia. At the time, the sale price was not made public, but as discussed in this previous post, there was reason to wonder if the sale made sense financially. Turns out, the sale makes hardly any sense at all. A reader of STPO … Read More
District Court refuses to reconsider opinion in USPS v. SCE
Today is the birthday of Benjamin Franklin, the Nation’s first Postmaster General, but U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg has given the Postal Service little reason to celebrate. On Thursday, Judge Boasberg denied the Postal Service’s Motion for Reconsideration, which asked him to revise the Opinion he issued back in September in the case of USPS v. Southern California Edison … Read More
Your Walmart closing? There’s always your local post office
Whenever the Postal Service wants to close a post office, it tells affected customers about all the “alternative access” points in the area where they will continue to be able to do some postal business — like buying stamp booklets at Walmart. The Postal Service usually includes a list and map of all these alternatives in the discontinuance notice (as … Read More
Trucks on fire: USPS Long Life Vehicles outlive their lifespan
With over 211,000 vehicles, the Postal Service operates the largest civilian fleet in the world. About 190,000 vehicles are used to collect and deliver the mail, and about 140,000 of them are Grumman-built Long Life Vehicles (LLVs), the iconic postal trucks that are a ubiquitous presence on America’s streets and roads. These LLVs are getting on in years, and it’s long … Read More
The Postal Service opens Round 3 in the fight over the exigent rate increase
Yesterday the Postal Service filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia, arguing that the Postal Regulatory Commission was wrong in its most recent ruling on the exigent rate increase. The Postal Service wants the case remanded to the Commission for further review so that it can renew its arguments for an extension of the 4.3 … Read More
The Year in Review: The Postal Service submits its Annual Compliance Report for FY 2015
Earlier this week the Postal Service submitted its FY 2015 Annual Compliance Report (ACR) to the Postal Regulatory Commission. Over the next few weeks, the Commission will review the report, request more information, give stakeholders an opportunity to comment, and then, sometime in March, issue its own Annual Compliance Determination (ACD) report. The USPS ACR is on the PRC website here; last … Read More
South Florida P&DC goes for $5.8 million more than the USPS sold it for, just two months ago
The City of Pembroke Pines, Florida, just got a nice Christmas present, courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service. On October 23, 2015, the Postal Service closed on a deal to sell the South Florida P & DC to the City of Pembroke Pines for $17.88 million. Today, less than two months later, the City announced that it had sold the … Read More
A Bill of Rights for the Post Office
Some people just love to complain about the Postal Service, but the vast majority of Americans are pretty happy with the service they receive at their post office. In fact, several new surveys show once again that people think the post office is just fine. According to a new Gallup poll, Americans rank the customer service they receive at post … Read More
Photographing the post offices of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
For over four years, from 2011 to 2015, Lucy and Lina Blair traveled through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula photographing each and every one of its 134 post offices. It was a way to bring them to each town in the U.P. so they could get to know their region better. They’ve put together a book of the photos, and they’ve shared many … Read More
Measure to Measure: Data, management, and the reliability of the mail
MARK JAMISON Reliable. It seems like a simple and straightforward word. It conveys, if not a very specific meaning, at least a pretty concrete sense of satisfying expectations. In some contexts, like certain forms of statistics and technical applications, reliable and reliability refer to the overall consistency of a measurement or the accuracy of the data being measured. But when … Read More
The Postal Service’s “Retail Channel Strategy”: A blueprint for privatizing the post office
It’s been clear for a long time that the Postal Service is in the process of privatizing itself by shifting processing operations to companies like Pitney Bowes through the workshare system and contracting out billions of dollars of work to private corporations (over $12 billion in 2014). The Postal Service has also been working to privatize its retail operations by … Read More
Postal Service releases on-time performance reports for Q4 2015
The Postal Service has released its on-time performance reports for the fourth quarter of the fiscal year (July 1 – Sept. 30, 2015). Compared to the third quarter, on-time performance for most types of mail has improved, but performance remains significantly down from the same period last year (SPLY) — before the changes in service standards and operations at … Read More
Richmond’s historic Saunders Station post office sold, finally
After trying to dispose of it for over four years, the Postal Service has finally sold the historic 1937 Saunders Station post office at 1625 Broad Street in Richmond, Virginia. The Postal Service apparently got ahead of itself and began renting space for the new location of the post office back in 2011, when it originally expected to sell the … Read More
When Titans collide: UPS petitions the PRC to change USPS costing methodologies
BY MARK JAMISON The United Parcel Service is very concerned that you might be paying too much for a postage stamp. If you’re wondering why UPS would be worried about something like that, it has to do with the way postal rates are set. According to the law, each USPS product is supposed to cover its share of the … Read More