The Mailers Council has challenged the U.S. Postal Service to come up with a more "credible" plan for reversing its poor financial performance and declining mail volume.
It came up with a broad outline of issues it had to deal with like a ceiling on borrowing.
If the decline in mail volume continues, the plan should indicate the postal service's plans to reduce staffing and close facilities, the Council said. It also recommended that the USPS come up with a closure plan similar to the one used for closing military bases put forth a few years ago.
The Council, a coalition of 40 mailers and mailing associations, also suggested the USPS may have to redefine universal postal and offer alternatives. The Council noted that the plan must indicate how the Postal Service will cope with the escalating retirement costs.
The USPS has been running multi-billion-dollar deficits for a long time and experienced a 5.5% volume decline last year, the majority of which was Standard or advertising mail.
"There are many things the USPS could do legally but not politically," said executive director Bob McLean. "Everybody will have to make sacrifices--mailers as well as postal employees but the challenge is to get these past Congress.
"When they tried to cut down delivery from six days to five that didn't go over very well," he added.
McLean stressed that the Council is not making any concrete proposals now but is just trying to bring up issues that need to be discussed.
