January financials: rate increase brings in big bucks
The USPS had a 10.3% increase in January revenues compared with the prior year, thanks to the rate increase implemented on January 8. Unfortunately for the USPS, the money being brought in by the increase is still earmarked for the congressionally mandated escrow fund, not for paying expenses. And while January looked good, for the fiscal year to date, revenue is up by just $343 million or 1.4% over SPLY. Expenses, on the other hand, are up by $918 million or 4.0% above SPLY.
Priority and Express continue to show healthy growth, with Priority volumes up 7.5% year to date, and Express up by 5.5%.
The full report in is available at the USPS Financials web page, in either Excel or Adobe format. The USPS analysis notes appear after the break:
‘War on Terror’ goes postal
Postal Police Officer may not be the most glamorous career choice you could make (speaking as a budget analyst, I know something about non-glamorous careers!). But a postal cop in Louisiana has apparently found a way to puff up his chest a bit- he’s fighting the ‘War on Terror’!
When a journalist for Germany’s Deutsche Welle network attempted to videotape people queueing up to get their mail, he was told by postal police to leave the premises. He complied, but continued taping through a fence. The cops again told him to stop taping. When the journalist objected, pointing out the lack of signs indicating the area was in any way restricted, he was told to hand over his videotape. When he refused, he was handcuffed. He wasn’t released until he finally agreed to hand over the video.
The punch line?
The reporter says that at least twice, one of the cops told him ”that in the past, I would have gotten away with [filming] but not now with the ‘war on terror’“.
U.S. Postal Service detains journalist, keeping his videotape
Defining your terms
Hidden among the piles of documents filed with the Postal Rate Commission is one that I hadn’t seen in a long time- the “Glossary of Postal Terms“.
Don’t know the difference between a RAP and the RAPS? Can’t remember what makes a container an ERMC rather than a GPMC? It’s all here, and more. Remember ‘Activity Based Management’? No, I didn’t think so. How about ‘M-bags’?
And along the way you’ll find ‘pie-cart’, ‘killer bars’, ‘lawn crossing’, ‘7:01 rule’, and my favorite from the days of the LSM: ’smiles, frowns, and upside downs’.
Opening the can of worms?
As the Postal Rate Commission prepares to consider the USPS request for an advisory opinion on service changes that might result from proposed network changes, interested parties are lining up to intervene. As of this morning, Postcom, the DMA, NAPUS, the National Newspaper Association, Time Warner, and the APWU have filed notice that they intend to intervene. (It goes without saying that chronic intervenor David Popkin is also on the list).
The APWU’s intervention is off to a robust start, with a five page, single spaced laundry list of questions about the entire consolidation process, right down to “Were managers given instructions, encouragement, or incentives to file AMP studies?”
The USPS response has been to remind the APWU that the advisory opinion requested deals only with service changes, not with the realignment process itself. It will be interesting to see how the PRC responds.
Stay tuned…
Speaker Hastert offers logistics advice
Well I guess this raises the ante a bit, no? Speaker Dennis Hastert has decided to get involved in the ‘controversy’ surrounding the Rockford mail processing plant. A local TV station reports that Hastert has co-authored, with Rockford Rep. Don Manzullo a letter to the Postmaster General informing him that consolidating Rockford into Palatine would:
”‘… tax the extremely busy Palatine office and impair Rockford`s efficiency by jeopardizing the one-day turnaround service for local first class mail that residents in the 610 and 611 zip codes currently enjoy.’ The letter goes on to say that Palatine processes four times more mail than Rockford, and adding to this volume would further slow down delivery time.”
Hastert’s expertise in logistics may come as a surprise, but hey- if Bill Frist can diagnose brain damage by watching videotapes, mail processing should be a piece of cake.
It’s easy to point out the stupidity of moving mail processing 50 or a hundred miles down the road. It’s just ridiculous!
I mean really- this kind of thing wouldn’t happen if the Postal Service was a competitive business rather than a bloated monopoly, right?
Well, I don’t know about that. I see a milk tanker go by my house most mornings, carrying milk from the dairy farm up the road. I don’t know where it goes from here, but based on the “Cabot Creamery” logo, I’d bet Vermont. So when I stop by my local supermarket and pick up a bar of Cabot cheddar, there’s a good chance that at least some of it originated half a mile away, and then made a two or three hundred mile trip before coming to rest in my fridge.
Talk about ridiculous! That dairy farm should be making its own cheese, not unnecesarily taxing that overworked cheese factory in Vermont!
It’s enough to make you want to write a letter to Cabot demanding to know why they condone this waste of cheesebuyers money! Better yet, FedEx it to them, because then you know they’ll get it right away.
By way of Memphis, TN.
A sad commentary
It’s hard to believe an actual postal worker ever thought this was funny- but to see something like this around after last week’s events is pretty sad.
Source: Flickr
First class volume down by a billion pieces in first quarter
First class mail volume was down by just under a billion pieces from the prior year in the quarter ending December 31, according to volume numbers released by the US Postal Service on Wednesday. The 3.8% decline in first class volume was only partially offset by a slight (0.5%) increase in standard volume. In terms of dollars, first class was down $415 million, while the standard increase was just $30 million. There was continued growth in both Express Mail (up 5.7%) and Priority (up 4.1%), but the additional revenue from the two classes combined came to just $75 million more than the prior year.
The decline in volume wasn’t a total surprise- a year ago there was a sharp spike in mail volume attributed by USPS CFO Dick Strasser to “the quadrennial impact of election mailings, increased activity in marketing financial services and credit cards”.
An additional concern for the postal service was a 0.7% decline in Total Factor Productivity.
Source: USPS Revenue Pieces and Weights Reports, Postal Quarter 1, FY 2006
Postal Payroll
The periodic reports posted on the Postal Rate Commission web site may not be everyone’s idea of a fun read, but they’re full of interesting numbers when you poke around in them. Today brings a sheaf of payroll reports- itemizing in mind-numbing detail (1,408 pages to be exact) what the USPS has paid out to its employees in the first 16 weeks of the fiscal year. If you’re thinking that maybe you’ll skip reading the whole thing just now, here are some of the interesting numbers: (more…)
The USPS In the Bush 2006 Budget
Here is what the Bush budget has to say about the US Postal Service. Note that the USPS Civil Service Retirement over-payment has now become “savings provided to the Postal Service by the Postal Civil Service Retirement System Funding Reform Act of 2003″, (as if it was money he and the Congress had provided, rather than postal customers):
POSTAL SERVICE
The Administration continues to strongly support efforts to enact comprehensive postal reform legislation that fosters a healthy Postal Service for future generations. The Postal Service provides an important service to the American people and the economy, and the Administration believes that the Postal Service should continue providing affordable and reliable universal service, while limiting exposure to taxpayers and operating appropriately in the competitive marketplace.
Postal reform must be accomplished in a responsible manner that is fair to taxpayers, ratepayers, and Postal Service employees. It must be consistent with the principles of best governance practices, transparency, flexibility, accountability, and self-finance, as expressed by the President in December 2003, and not have an adverse impact on the Federal budget. To this end, the Administration supports reforms that: allow the Postal Service pricing flexibility, but within a firm annual Consumer Price Index rate cap and with a strict limit on the circumstances when rates can exceed the cap; require compliance with all Securities and Exchange Commission financial reporting standards; and permit greater flexibility in the use of negotiated service agreements and worksharing arrangements. In addition, the 2007 Budget proposes to use the pension savings provided to the Postal Service by the Postal Civil Service Retirement System Funding Reform Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-18) that would otherwise be held in escrow in 2006 and beyond, to put the Postal Service on a path that fully funds its substantial retiree health benefits liabilities.
The media didn’t ‘go postal’
Fears that the news media would bring back the ‘going postal’ stereotype in the wake of the Goleta killings have so far not, for the most part, come true.
A Google news search for ‘going postal’ the day after the incident turned up a large number of hits, but the vast majority came from an Associated Press story that was carried on many sites, often more than once as it was updated with new developments. The AP dispatches mention, fairly deep in the story, that a series of killings in the 80’s gave rise to the phrase.