Postal Service Outlines 10-Year Plan to Address Declining Revenue, Volume
TweetWASHINGTON — Facing unprecedented volume declines and a projected, cumulative $238 billion shortfall during the next decade, Postmaster General John E. Potter today outlined an aggressive plan of cost cutting, increased productivity, and an array of legislative and regulatory changes necessary to maintain a viable United States Postal Service.
“The crisis we’re facing gives us an historic opportunity to make changes that will lay the foundation for a leaner, more market responsive Postal Service that can thrive far into the future,” Potter said, stressing that there is no one single answer or quick fix to the crisis.
The Postal Service examined revenue, volume and consumer trends; analyzed revenue and product opportunities employed by foreign posts; and examined more than 50 possible actions to realistically address volume declines that will not return, increasing health care and delivery costs, and dramatic changes to consumer behavior.
“The future depends on a suite of solutions that takes a balanced and reasonable approach, one that cuts across every aspect of our industry but one that, in the end, does the greatest possible good for our stakeholders and the American public,” Potter said.
Mail volume is projected to fall from 177 billion in 2009 to 150 billion in 2020. That represents a 37 percent decline in First-Class Mail alone. Revenue contributed by First-Class Mail will plummet from 51 percent today to about 35 percent in 2020.
“Ensuring a Viable Postal Service for America,” the Postal Service business plan, addresses these challenges, and describes a flexible, agile Postal Service that can adapt to America’s changing mailing habits and preferences.
If the Postal Service takes no action, it will face a cumulative shortfall of $238 billion by 2020. But Potter outlined a number of actions that could amount to as much as $123 billion in savings during that same time period. These actions build on the Postal Service’s record of saving more than $1 billion every year since 2001 and include continuing to aggressively control costs and eliminating hundreds of millions of work hours.
Despite these efforts, an estimated $115 billion shortfall will remain. The business plan identifies actions to close that gap:
- Restructure retiree health benefits payments to be consistent with what is used by the rest of the federal government and the majority of the private sector and address overpayments to the Postal Service Civil Service Retirement System pension fund.
- Adjust delivery days to better reflect current mail volumes and customer habits.
- Continue to modernize customer access by providing services at locations that are more convenient to customers, such as grocery stores, pharmacies, retail centers, and office supply stores. Increase and enhance customer access through partnerships, self-service kiosks and a world-class Website.
- Establish a more flexible workforce that is better positioned to respond to changing demand patterns, as more than 300,000 employees become eligible to retire in the coming decade.
- Ensure that prices of Market Dominant mailing products are based on demand for each individual product and its costs, rather than capping prices for every class at the rate of inflation.
- A modest exigent price increase will be proposed, effective in 2011.
- Permit the Postal Service to evaluate and introduce more new products consistent with its mission, allowing it to better respond to changing customer needs and compete more effectively in the marketplace.
“Lifestyles and ways of doing business have changed dramatically in the last 40 years, but some of the laws that govern the Postal Service have not. These laws need to be modernized to reflect today’s economic and business challenges and the dramatic impact the Internet has had on American life,” Potter said.
The business plan is a path to the future, the Postmaster General said, a future where the Postal Service remains a vital driver of the American economy, an integral part of every American community and continues to deliver the greatest value of any comparable post in the world.
“If given the flexibility to respond to an evolving marketplace, the Postal service will continue to be an integral part of the fabric of American life,” Potter said.
For more information, fact sheets, soundbites and graphics, please visit
http://www.usps.com/strategicplanning/futurepostalservice.htm
March 2nd, 2010 12:31
Let people retire early with no reduction..
That will speed the process up a lot.
March 2nd, 2010 14:54
Add putting out more collection boxes to allow for convenient and friendly pick-up of mail. DO NOT continue to eliminate service by adamantly removing boxes. Keep management tuned in to Customer Connect. The lack of follow-up is astonishing and shocking. Leave the retirees alone unless you intend to give them the same benefits as you, Mr Potter, have along with the Senate and House.
March 2nd, 2010 15:40
Consolidate more plants that is where the biggest savings will be.
March 2nd, 2010 18:16
Very simple plan:
1) End Saturday delivery;
2) No more pre-funding of retiree benefits;
3) 15 % reduction in management personnel of all crafts;
4) Cash out with disability retirement all light duty people who have been on it more than 5 years;
Steve (29 year carrier)
March 2nd, 2010 19:20
Put collection boxes back out on street corners to make it more conveniant for our customers. Instruct all letter carriers to clean out boxes on a daily basis as they walk past them. All mail is collected everyday without any additional cost such as a specific motorized truck position as in the past. Better service with no additional cost.
March 2nd, 2010 19:44
They should stop the overtime, so many employee are making double their salary, so much overtime being used
March 2nd, 2010 20:06
cut the useless ranks of clipboard carrying supervisors who do nothing to promote the postal service. capture the well of discretionary effort that the “good employees” will give readily if not ineptly micromanaged to death. follow the national agreement, stop breaking work rules. increase self management. you only need an accountable paper supervisor, and a station manager….
March 2nd, 2010 21:09
I’ve been delivering mail for 24 years, and I have 4 (FOUR!) supervisors who collectively don’t have my years of experience. Are they gonna tell me how to deliver mail? I think not! All these supervisors do is punch in numbers, then send those numbers to our PM, who sends them to area, who sends them to regional, and so on and so forth until they reach Washington. Do we really need all of these management personnel to relay the same numbers? That’s where the waste is, but no one wants to tell Congress that. Let’s cut the waste within in the organization before we deplete the service to the people we’re supposed to be serving in the first place!
March 2nd, 2010 21:38
Bill
You said it all, we got our standup from our “new” PM today, same old s#*t as the last 26 years I’ve been here, how we suck and aren’t making standards, I do my job in spite of managements dumb asses! I have total respect and admiration from my customers, if it wasn’t for me, my customers perception of the USPS, a bunch of fu*#en retards! from the 1-800 #, down to the inept fools we have always had running our PO! literally hundreds of different supervisors, and who knows how may OIC’s and PM’s! Have 30 years in, gonna stay until it sinks baby! I love my job!!!
March 2nd, 2010 22:43
Joan,
Do you know why we have overtime? It’s because routes have been adjusted to be over 8 hours in a single day. There are offices that have been deliberately short staffed. Instead of filling the position, they rather “split” the route up among the carriers who are actually working that day which does incur overtime costs.
March 2nd, 2010 23:41
The real problem is.. The postal service does not use it resources , not the good ones anyways. I have had the displeasure of working somewhere were nuputism was full force and even the “new” pm looked the other way said nothing. How does it feel to see a full time job slip through your hands …crappy and u wonder why people go postal
March 3rd, 2010 01:34
Postal managers micro manage workers. They expect you to tell them within minutes of how long it will take you to do your days work. Then they hold you to it regardless of how many customers stop you in the street to ask questions, traffic conditions, weather conditions, and countless other daily time killers that you face. Supervisors tell us that there are no explanations only excuses. Five minutes late can be grounds for disciplinary action. So carriers rush and then make errors and this creates dangerous conditions, even driving accidents.
The routes are now over burdened and even though you have been delivering the mail for years and years, they think they know a better way. And let me tell you the truth, Almost every suggestion that they have given on how to do my job better, takes longer.
Delivering the Mail is what we do, leave us alone and let us do our jobs. Concentrate on creating more mail volume and not on how to blame the work force for poor upper management decisions.
March 3rd, 2010 07:54
Thank God I am seeing letter carriers respond quickly. I like Steve’s idea except for losing a day’s delivery. Letter carriers should be allowed input here. The time has come to dump worthless, do nothing management personnel who do nothing save for the video games played on USPS computers. Hold back bonuses and take back any Potter took. Allow carriers to manage themselves on the street and the OT would diminish. Half the wasted time is attributed to continued micro/autocratic managing and must be eliminated thus taking the top heavy do nothings out. Leave retirees alone.
March 3rd, 2010 08:51
#1:Write or e-mail your congress person(in both houses) not just in the comment section. #2: Reduce management, we are top heavy and can not afford layers of personnel that do not touch the mail, from Potter on down. They can be put back in the crafts,no additional hiring needed. #3:Offer a buyout to retirement aged personnel. #4:Do the changes quickly,if this proves anything its our congress and the USPS moves too slow,if at all.
March 3rd, 2010 17:31
We need to work on this together. If you are not informed
our contract says we should have 1 supervisor for every 70 employees. Our office has 250 workers and we have 16 supervisors ,WOW ,what happen to the contract. Until they address this problem the USPS will go no where fast.Why are we so top heavy. The costs have always been affordable when I was hired in stamps were 29 cents.They are now 44 cents thats less than 1 penny a year. Not to shabby. We need to offer early outs for people eligible without the 2% penalty or give lump sums for sick leave. We all have to submit ideas.We can do this
March 3rd, 2010 20:08
Until recently, our office was never afforded a supervisor with any knowledge or drive to work harmoniously with city and rural carriers. A HUGE amount of money spent by the Postal Service is wasted on weak efforts to remove carriers. In a good 95% of the time, the manager in question has, yet once again, failed to take the proper steps and thus lost his/her case and lost valuable monies again and again. Add it all up and it comes to billions. Marvin Runyon, maybe the worst PMG we’ve ever had, came to the job to “carve” the fat away. His first move: Hired an additional 30,000 supervisory personnel and became even more top heavy. The good news is he’s gone now. The bad? He took a ton of unearned money with him.
March 4th, 2010 15:07
Accountability is golden, start with PMG Potter. The waste, the mis-use of public funds is criminal. Stop blaming and trying to exterminate the worker bees. Why is it that all the PMG can come up with is to reduce service when our sole purpose is to provide service business. Lets close plants & Post Offices, replace employees with machines,eliminate service on Saurdays and raise the price of postage for most of the americans across this great country. Exception being the big discounts for the major mailers at the expense of the public. Sounds similiar to the Bush tax cuts for the rich. The Postal Service has eliminated approx. 100,000 jobs in about 2 years, we are now working with a skeleton crew and it is effecting the service we provide and turning customers away Get a grip.
March 4th, 2010 15:08
The communities we serve across this great country deserve better. After all they are keeping the lights on.
March 5th, 2010 07:21
When the schools fail, you get back to the basics of the 3 R’s.
When the Post Office fails , you get back to basics of Delivering the Mail.
Thereby cutting the layers upon layers of Managerial overhead. District and VPs , Pay for Performance Bonuses.
We all watch Management run in Packs these days, all making 100K or more. Most are useless, even the Postmasters Union wants the District people eliminated .
The Inspection Service is sucking Millions in parties bonuses, and wasted monies. We only need security guards not 007′s.
However, I believe they will never change until they lock the front doors for the last time…
March 5th, 2010 20:16
The cuts need to start from the top. That’s you Potter. Letter carriers are the backbone of the usps, and are always nickle and dimed to death. Managers walk into each other all day because there are to many of them, and they don’t do their jobs. I asked my delivery supervisor to follow the M 39, just as we are to follow the m41. Her response was ( I don’t know what that is). Holy crap people, it seems like all of the lazy people who can’t carry mail, or are just to lazy to carry mail, go into management. Carriers today are asked to manage the mail themselves, and be back in 8 hours. If we are doing that, do we really need a supervisor? Cut the waste where the waste is, management! And start form the top .
March 6th, 2010 12:15
I like what Ralf said back to basics. When I started we were here to service the public! The supervisors 20-plus years ago would tell us that and we were proud to be the USPS. I am ashamed to see the long lines in the postal service lobbies. The back of my check still says from our customers.
The pay for performance for managers is earned with our sweat, not anything special that they think they did.
March 7th, 2010 17:12
These don’t inc Pay for Performance bonuses or benefits:
512 USPS people AK-GA make >$100K >= $51,200,000
110 DC >$150K >= 16,500,000
770 DC >$100K >= 77,000,000
>= 144,500,000.
+ Guam-Wyoming ? + etc
THESE FOLKS DON’T TOUCH THE MAIL.
Gee, where could we find cost savings ?
March 11th, 2010 22:49
How about a 20 year eligible retirement option for FERS. Many employees would leave after 20 and you can hire new employees at the lower starting pay for craft. The best employees would put in for management jobs to get high 3 as soon as possible for a 20 year retirement.
March 12th, 2010 12:47
Has the postal service ever heard of shared services, do we really need a post master in every office, can’t we have supervisor’s run the office and have a central postmaster that is in charge of a group of offices. Increase the step level and put them in charge of 5 or 6 offices that they visit daily and work out of one cental office. There would be an enormous savings there alone in salary and benefits. Stop violating the national and local agreements, this strong arm tactic by management should not be tolerated at the expense of the employee’s. Stop downsizing offices and cutting customer service, while you have employees who work in large plants where they have been excessed to and don’t have full time work. They sit in breakrooms in plants until work comes in, (OC )on call employees who would benefit the offices they were forced out of allot more then where they are at. The offices that they left are working on a short staffed work force. How about doing a function 4 audit during the busier months of the year not the dead ones, and basing there evaluations on the workforce when the mail volume is at its lightest, and then excessing to many employees out. Why doesn’t the P.O. fight to stop overpaying the retirement benefits of employees, and fight to be treated like other goverment agencies. They would find out that we are still working in a profit margin and not losing 5 to 7 billion dollars a year. It sounds like upper Postal Management would like it this way for now so they can screw us when it is time to renegotiate our contracts. They are painting a false picture of what is really going on so they can try to get what they want at the table when the time comes. It is time that our unions NALC and the APWU take a step back and realize that they are much stronger as one union, fighting for all of our rights. Strenght comes in numbers and the merger of the two unions would be unprecedented, a much stronger vivable union working for the better of its members.
March 30th, 2010 19:59
Please, have Congress look into the top heavy management of the USPS. Don’t eliminate services, as that is what the USPS is all about.
May 23rd, 2010 09:16
Funny video on the Post Office.http://www.youtube.com/user/PetePostal#p/u/13/l47Xxq3GGt4
See them all before You Tube bans them.
June 12th, 2010 23:15
Let the employees with 35 years service get 80 per cent retirement that would save a lot of money
June 12th, 2010 23:17
Give another $30,000 buy out they will come out ahead
getting the civil service employees out