How USPS Is Like an Airline, and Why That Matters

A postal official made a revealing statement last week about the U.S. Postal Service’s attempt to get higher-than-inflation rate increases.

If USPS’s “financial challenges were alleviated by the timely enactment of laws that close a $20 billion budget gap, the Postal Service would reconsider its pricing strategy,” Deputy Postmaster General Ron Stroman wrote last week in a Post & Parcel letter to the editor. The request for “exigent” rate increases – on which a ruling is due Monday --was “a last resort,” according to USPS’s #2 man.

USPS has spent years trying to pass exigent rate increases to help it dig out of the red. So why would it even think about walking away from a legal victory that could be worth a couple of billion dollars a years?

My theory: Postal officials aren’t sure an extraordinary rate increase will help the agency. They’re worried that breaching the inflation-based cap that has kept most postal rates in check will undermine confidence in the mail system, pushing mailers to switch even more communications to digital delivery.

In the simplistic thinking of some Congress members – whom USPS is apparently trying to appease with its rate request – the answer to insufficient revenue is simple: Increase your rates.

But postal officials know that higher prices don’t mean more revenue if they lead to fewer mailings. They’ve seen this movie before in the pre-rate-cap days, and the ending wasn’t pretty, including a drastic decline in catalog mailings.

It helps to understand that, as I wrote in 2009, the U.S. Postal Service is like a money-losing airline that is flying a lot of half-full planes. Many of the airline’s costs are the same regardless how many passengers are on the planes.

You can’t fly with fewer pilots or reduce the jet’s depreciation just because most of the seats are empty. Nor can the Postal Service deliver to fewer addresses just because its mail bags are not as full as they used to be.

If the airline raises its prices, competitors will lure away passengers with lower fares. At the margin, even a bargain-rate passenger is profitable; the only cost of adding one to a plane is a few gallons of jet fuel, a bag of stale pretzels, and a tiny can of soda.

Jacking up postal rates merely causes marketers to prospect more with email instead of direct mail, publishers to convert more subscribers to digital editions, and corporations to offer more incentives for customers who switch to electronic billing.

What the Postal Service needs is mostly in the hands of Congress, which structured USPS in the pre-internet days to be a cash cow for the federal government. Times have changed, and the cash cow has been milked so dry it can’t replace 25-year-old delivery vehicles that are held together with duct tape and rubber bands.

But the laws and practices that drained the Postal Service of billions of dollars remain unchanged. And, more than ever, USPS needs less not-in-my district Congressional interference that stymies reasonable downsizing of its distribution network.

What the Postal Service doesn’t need are rate-cap-busting price increases that drive away customers.

Related articles:

• What's Weighing Down the Postal Service?  
• Why the Exigent Postal Rate Increase Will Backfire
• UPS Praises Postal Service's Improvements, But Not Its Rate Hikes

The Oxymoron at the Root of USPS's Woes

Is the U.S. Postal Service a business or a public service? Congress can't decide on the answer, and that indecision creates a fundamental problem for USPS, says noted postal commentator Leo Raymond.

In the Postal Points newsletter for the Association of Marketing Service Providers, Raymond recently wrote about "an ongoing oxymoron that Congress, in its meddling ineptitude, continues to perpetuate: the Postal Service cannot be cast as a public service, with a 'universal service obligation,' while concurrently being told to be businesslike in its operations."

The universal service obligation means USPS has to provide roughly the same level of service to everyone at the same price, regardless of the agency's costs to serve a particular customer. That's contrary to sensible, business-like behavior: What enterprise in its right mind would charge 49 cents to send an un-presorted letter from Hawaii to a Maine island accessible only by boat?

"Fortunately for Congress, it only has to give orders, not figure out how to implement them," Raymond noted.

Raymond was commenting on my recent article Nine Ways the Postal Service Is Not Like a Real Business, which he said "gets to the heart" of the oxymoron.

Getting praise like that from someone who's a rock star among postal geeks -- and an almost simultaneous Twitter follow from the equally prestigious "Mr. Magazine" (Dr. Samir Husni) -- almost lends an air of respectability to this blog.

Hmm, I'll have to do something about that.

Related articles:

• 17 More Ways USPS Is Not Like a Real Business 
• Layers of Redundant Management Have Been Eliminated, USPS Says: Note the 35 comments, most from postal employees who disagree vociferously with the Postal Service's statement.
• Wanted: New Postmaster General; Must Be Able To Kiss 535 Backsides Simultaneously

Nine Ways the Postal Service Is Not Like a Real Business

The hand wringing about the U.S. Postal Service’s broken “business model” doesn’t fool us. The “dot com” at the end of “usps.com” doesn’t fool us. The nagging of politicians and pundits who say USPS should operate more like a business doesn’t fool us.

Despite all the talk about the Postal Service being a business, regular people understand it has the soul of a government agency and in fact is not allowed to act in a businesslike manner. Here are nine examples of how USPS is not like a real business:

1. Real businesses underfund their pensions. The Postal Service overfunded its pension plan (to the benefit of the federal government, not postal employees).


2. When a too-big-to-fail business gets into financial trouble, the federal government often props it up with interest-free loans in the name of economic stimulus. When the Postal Service ran into financial trouble, Congress insisted that it continue lending interest-free money to the federal government in the guise of prepaid retiree health benefits. 


3. A real business with thousands of employees might pay its CEO $50 million a year, and no one bats an eyelash. But if the Postmaster General, who oversees 600,000-plus workers, earns 1% of that amount ($500,000), watch the politicians fall all over themselves lambasting the Postal Service’s lavish spending.


4. Real businesses are governed by a board of directors, generally consisting of about a dozen leaders who are or soon become intimately familiar with the enterprise. But the supposedly independent Postal Service in reality is governed by a 535-member board known as Congress, whose members generally know nothing about the USPS’s operations except how to get a post office named and how to prevent it from closing.


5. Board members of a real business have powerful incentives, like stock options, to make the company run more efficiently. But a member of the Postal Service’s real board (that is, a Congressman) only has incentives to preserve inefficiencies that maximize the number of postal employees and facilities in his district.


6. When the board of a real business fails to act, board members get punished with a lower stock price and the prospect of not being re-elected. When the Postal Service’s real board of directors fails to act, postal customers get punished with higher prices.


7. Real businesses make money on monopolies – at least until the trust busters come along. The Postal Service has a government-protected monopoly on the mailbox, but it comes with such onerous conditions that the monopoly is unprofitable.


8. Real businesses make campaign contributions and use lobbyists to curry favor with members of Congress. The only “campaign donation” USPS makes is the franking privilege, which enables Congress members to send free mail to constituents (usually just before election time). USPS's lobbying efforts are limited severely by law.


9. A real business that is billions in debt, has too many locations and employees, and is subject to strong union contracts would have declared Chapter 11 by now. The law would be on its side as it tried to walk away from most of its debts, scale back its operations, and even slip out of its union contracts. The Postal Service, however, apparently cannot turn to the bankruptcy courts – one more example of how the law treats it as just another government agency even though it’s supposed to operate like a business.

Do you know of other ways in which USPS is not like a business? Add a comment to this blog post or email them to me at dead.tree.edition@gmail.com. I can keep your comments anonymous if you'd like. And please see the follow-up article, 17 More Ways USPS Is Not Like a Real Business, which is based on insights from Dead Tree Edition readers.

For background information on some of the items listed above, please see:

• Overfunded pensions: Pensions: Another Government Rip-off of the Postal Service
• Prepaid retiree health benefits as interest-free loans to the federal government:Postal Relief? How About No More Congressional Thievery?
• Punishing the customers: Why the Exigent Postal Rate Increase Will Backfire
• USPS bankruptcy: Could Forever Stamps Become Worthless? What Bankruptcy Might Mean for USPS

Why the Exigent Postal Rate Increase Will Backfire

Let’s be honest: Given the U.S. Postal Service’s dire financial condition, the 4.3% emergency rate increases it announced yesterday are hardly exorbitant. That won’t prevent the move from being a disaster for the nation’s mail system.

I have little doubt that some Congressman will blast the USPS Board of Governors for putting forth relatively small “exigent” (greater-than-inflation) price increases. But the micro-managers on Capitol Hill, who should be focused on getting their own house in order, need to understand why the governors aren’t pushing for more.

I think the Board of Governors is trying to make the best of a bad situation, attempting to satisfy the political pressure for higher prices without scaring away customers. I suspect they understand the dangers of any exigent increase in the context of recent Congressional inaction and downright buffoonery on postal issues.

Being part of an industry (magazine publishing) that opposes any exigent increases, I’m not supposed to say this but I will: Mail-dependent companies could probably stomach a one-time extra price increase of less than 5% if – and this is a big “if” – it were part of a larger move to put the Postal Service onto a sustainable path.

We wouldn’t like it, and we might grumble loudly. But most of us would happily pay a few more percentage points in return for ensuring the long-term health of the postal system. And we would stop putting so much energy into figuring out how to reduce our mail volumes and once again include creative use of the mail in our long-term marketing plans.

That, however, is not what happened yesterday. What we got instead was an exasperated Postal Service whose attempts to right the ship have been scuttled at almost every turn by a do-nothing Congress. Accompanying the announcement are:

• No refund of the billions of dollars the Postal Service overpaid into the federal pension system because of funky accounting.
• No payback of the billions of dollars in interest-free loans USPS has given the federal government under the euphemistic name of prepaid retiree health benefits.
• No real progress on consolidating the Postal Service’s bloated network of post offices.
• A recent reversal of progress on correcting the shamefully slow process of getting postal retirees their full annuity payments, which makes employees afraid to retire and stymies the Postal Service’s move to a smaller, more flexible workforce. (The much-maligned federal bureaucracy was making real headway until – you guessed it – Congress derailed the train of progress by failing to pass a budget, as explained in Budget Cuts Are Delaying USPS and Federal Retiree Payments.
• No action on allowing the Postal Service to start potentially lucrative ventures – even ones that wouldn’t really compete with private enterprise, such as delivering wine and beer.

All of that inaction makes yesterday’s announcement scary for the business mailers that provide the bulk of the Postal Service’s revenue. We can see what’s coming: Congress members will continue nagging the Postal Service to be more businesslike while forcing it to do something very un-businesslike – raising prices in the face of increased competition and declining demand.

What we mailers see is not a one-time price hike but rather the first of many “emergency” increases that will increasingly thrust USPS into a death spiral. Congress will keep blocking meaningful action on the Postal Service. But USPS customers (and employees) will be the ones who are punished.

As the mythical pirate captain told his crew, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

Except that, starting yesterday, mail-dependent companies began redoubling their efforts to get off the ship.

Don’t be surprised if more alternative-delivery ventures sprout up to deliver coupons, magazines, product samples, and even catalogs. Or if publications start providing real incentives to switch their subscribers to digital editions.

Don’t be surprised to see more “Go Green, Go Paperless” campaigns as banks and utilities desperately try to slash their mail volumes. (The “Go Green” part of the slogan is, at best, unsubstantiated, unless it refers to the bank’s cash flow and not to the environment.) Getting a large portion of its customers to switch to paper-less billing will look like a growing source of competitive advantage for companies that send a lot of bills.

Even without knowing whether yesterday’s proposal will stand up to litigation, business mailers all over the country are already asking the same questions: How can we reduce our mail volumes enough next year to counteract the price increase? And, longer term, how can we get out of the mail altogether before these price increases get totally out of hand?

Related articles:

• Why Potter Is Freezing Postal Rates, And What It Means For 2010  
• Mailers Rallying Against Rumored 10% Postage Hike
• Is the Postal Service Really Broke? 
• Congress Hears the Truth About Postal Service Finances