DENIED: The Postal Regulatory Commision rejected a proposed postage rate increase yesterday, putting the blame for USPS' financial shortfalls on "long-term structural problems" and not the flagging ecconomy.
In the last 24 hours, I have been inundated with requests for a blog post regarding yesterday’s decision by postal regulators to deny the request of the US Postal Service to raise postal rates beyond the rate of inflation. I struggled with the concept of a blog about this for a couple of reasons:
- Political commentary takes away from the mission of the Mail Print Insights Blog to educate on the latest and greatest innovations in direct marketing.
- We try to be a good partner with the USPS, although they make that highly difficult at times. Their attempt to raise postal rates is one of those difficult times.
So I’ll leave it at this… the economy and business structure we had as a country three years ago isn’t coming back. Entities, both public and private, that are still trying to figure out how to “go back” are failing and will continue to fail. Today, most printing companies are down 40% in revenue. Mail Print is growing strong, but that’s not because we recently changed our business model. It has evolved consistently over time to match the needs of businesses and consumers. We didn’t wait for the economy to slide.
For stable, strong, growing businesses “change” is constant and sometimes forced. The USPS had a “change” problem many years ago that was masked by a great economy. Can they now successfully navigate and the lead the change that is necessary? Time will tell, but they have a lot of catching up to do.
For more information on the recent ruling, here’s a good article from the Washington Post: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/09/request_to_raise_postage_rates.html?hpid=news-col-blog
Can’t get enough postage rate drama? Here’s the Postal Regulatory Commission’s denial report (with a good executive summary): http://prc.gov/prc-docs/home/whatsnew/Order%20No%20547_1392.pdf
