There’ll always be an England
From The Times: the moral maze in the UK:
“When letters were delivered with the stamps uncancelled, I used to cut them off and re-use them. But now I think that that was dishonest, so I ignore the temptation. After all, the Royal Mail has completed its obligation of posting that letter to me, so why shouldn’t it be paid?”
Click to read the response, which gets extra points for the use of the word ‘churlish’.
UPS: We’ll deliver your parcel when it suits us
From the Guardian’s consumer column:
‘At least rail companies can usually give you a time for their trains, even if they don’t stick to it. That is a feat delivery firms have not yet achieved, despite the miracles of modern communication, and Nia Williams wonders why. “UPS tried to deliver a laptop without warning when we were at work,” she writes. “We asked them to try on a Wednesday after 4pm, but they couldn’t guarantee a time or day. They called round on the Tuesday, again when we were at work. Then they agreed to try to deliver late on Wednesday, so I took the afternoon off work and arrived home to find they had already been. That was their third and final attempt.”
‘UPS claims it can’t offer exact delivery times, or even four-hour windows of opportunity, because of “the unpredictability of road conditions, changing shipment volumes and the planning of driver routes”. It points out that customers can arrange to receive a parcel at work or elsewhere.’
No Miranda rights for postal employees?
Do postal employees have the right to remain silent when questioned by members of the Inspection Service, or agents of the USPS Inspector General? No. That’s the surprising assertion made by IG David C. Williams in a letter to APWU Director of Industrial Relations Greg Bell.
Williams was responding to an article by Bell in the November/December 2005 issue of the APWU’s American Postal Worker magazine, entitled ‘What’s Behind the Changes in Internal Investigations?’. Bell wrote that “You have the right to remain silent. A historic Supreme Court ruling (Miranda v. Arizona, 1966) holds that not only must a law enforcement officer advise an individual of certain rights, the officer must be sure that these rights are understood.”
In his letter, Williams responds “I am concerned that the article incorrectly states that APWU members have an unequivocal right to remain silent during an interview by the Office of the Inspector General by virtue of Miranda v. Arizona. The article suggests that OIG agents must provide Miranda warnings to all employees prior to their interview, and that the employee may always refuse to answer questions absent a grant of immunity. This is incorrect.”
Which, not surprisingly, provoked a response from Bell.
‘What’s Behind the Changes in Internal Investigations?’
Lessons in public relations
I’m not sure exactly what our PR strategy is in the plant consolidation process, but it’s consistent at least- from the story on Bryan Texas:
“The United States Postal Service is deciding if Bryan’s processing facility should be consolidated with North Houston’s… The post office is not saying what else could come out of the survey, if anything.”
“The Bryan Post office refuses to comment on the issue. While USPS hasn’t released any information on whether there will be job cuts or what delay Brazos Valley residents should expect.”
Personally, I don’t think we have anything to hide- so why do we go out of our way to make it look like we do?
APX: Package Collapse
Traffic World reports in this week’s print edition on the aftermath of the collapse of Parcel Select consolidator APX, which the magazine calls “the largest shutdown of [a] cargo transportation provider since the close of USF Red Star in spring 2004 and before that the abrupt shuttering of national LTL giant Consolidated Freightways in 2001.”
Competitors like DHL scrambled to sign up APX customers, as did the Postal Service itself. Regardless of where those customers end up, the story says, they will “almost certainly see shipping costs rise in the long run as the dust of APX’s demise settles.”
APX started life as American Package Express. “In 2004, Heritage Partners acquired the well-regarded small-package division of RR Donnelley Logistics and combined it with American Package, naming the new entity APX Logistics… Last November it added Chester King, a former USPS marketing executive, to head its postal affairs.”
A Bear Stearns analyst, Edward M. Wolfe, cited in the story, suggests ”the big integrated parcel carriers are likely to benefit the most in the near term as APX customers divert packages to those higher priced ground networks. But in the long run, Wolfe wrote, those volumes would probably be converted to comparable bulk mail services at those same companies.”
More on the plant consolidation process
The following is excerpted from the minutes of the Mailers’ Technical Advisory Committee meeting that took place last month in Washington. In this excerpt, USPS VP for Network Operations Management Paul Vogel discusses the plant consolidation process:
Absurd inconsistencies?
An editorial in the San Antonio Express-News takes on the Jason Lyon case and finds “absurd inconsistencies” between the attitudes of the military on the one hand, and the postal service on the other. Lyon is the National Guardsman from Buffalo who was injured in Iraq. He subsequently applied for work with the postal service, and was turned down for a letter carrier position because of his injury. The military, meanwhile, certified him as fit for combat duty.
There’s nothing absurd or inconsistent here- its just a case of two agencies with two different sets of interests. The postal service needs carriers, but the fact is that there are plenty of people eager to get a job at the PO, so the service can be choosy about whom it hires. (Don’t forget- the USPS didn’t say it wouldn’t hire Lyon- it just wouldn’t hire him as a carrier.)
The military, on the other hand, doesn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing amongst potential ‘employees’- the war in Iraq has made it so difficult to get recruits that the Defense Department has had to scramble to lower its standards and increase its incentives to get people to enlist. Which of course, is also how National Guardsmen like Lyon ended up in Iraq in the first place. Of course the military is ready to send Lyon back to Iraq!
Advice from the Lexington Institute
The Lexington Institute, the far right lobbying group that periodically trots out Sam Ryan to snarl about the postal service now presents a piece by a former USPS economist claiming to explain just how the service can bring its costs under control.
USPS February Financials
The US Postal Service yesterday issued financial results for February. Click here for the Adobe .pdf version of the report, or here for the same data in an Excel spreadsheet.
Revenue for the month was up by 5.4% from the prior year, which is the amount of the rate increase implemented in January. Revenue from the mail was only up by 4.4% (page 3)- the rest of the increase in income came from investment income, services and appropriations.
For the fiscal year to date, revenue is up 2.2% to the prior year. All of the increased revenue came from commercial categories- permit imprint and presort. Sales of stamps and metered postage are actually down from the prior year by about 100 million year to date. Expenses have risen by 3.9%.
Net income for the year to date is $1.3 billion. Unfortunately, $1.25 billion of that is earmarked for the so-called escrow account, and will be unavailable to the Postal Service.
Mail volume was just about flat- up by 0.2% for the month, 0.1% year to date. First class volume was down 0.9% for the month, -1.5% year to date. Standard mail was up by 0.8% for the month, 1.4% for the year to date.
Express mail and Priority continued to show strong growth, but still represent less than ten percent of total USPS revenue. Together, they account for $220 million in additional revenue so far this year.
Read on for the USPS analysis comments from the report:
Stolen DVD!?
Urban Spaceman on Flickr says “I have a good feeling that unlike other instances of misrouted or damaged mail, this DVD was stolen by a postal worker”.
Well, maybe, but I wouldn’t be so sure. In the first place, the damage is about what you’d expect from a flimsy piece of mail, open on two sides, with something rigid inside. When these pieces go through facer-canceller, bar code sorter, etc., they pass between a drive belt that pulls them in, and a rubber roller running in the opposite dirrection, whose purpose is to allow only one piece of mail to go through at a time. If there’s any imperfection on the leading edge of the mail piece, there’s a chance that the piece will be damaged in just the way this one is.
Netflix mailers run a very high risk of being damaged like this, because they’re so flimsy. And the discs are obviously at risk, given the lack of any padding. I was amazed the first time I saw a Netflix mailer- I was sure the damage rate would be too high for it to work, but obviously it isn’t.
Having said that, enough do get damaged to be a headache for the USPS. They are much more trouble than a regular letter, but they pay the same postage. Given that Netflix is one of the few businesses actually increasing it’s First Class mail usage, however, the post office doesn’t have much choice but to deal with them.