The U.S. Postal Service continues to project a mediocre financial end to a very dismal year. The year-to-date accumulated loss is expected to top $1 billion, and postal officials have been trumpeting their efforts to eke out some savings from their various programs.
If the postmaster general and the Board of Governors really want to trim some fat, they should take a closer look at some of the USPS’ e-commerce initiatives. And a good place to start is the Mailing Online folly.
The USPS’ frustrating pursuit of hybrid mail (i.e., the electronic transmission of messages to near-destination facilities for conversion into printed communications which are then delivered by mail) has been akin to the alchemist’s search for the philosophers’ stone. Its methods, however, have been considerably more wasteful.
For instance, in a report to the Postal Rate Commission, the USPS noted it spent some $5.3 million during accounting periods one through six to realize some $56,000 in postage. Few businesses in America could sustain losses like this chasing such a dog of a venture.
There is a future in hybrid mail. It’s just that its not in the postal service’s creation of a soup-to-nuts system. The USPS is not now and never has been structured to be a real business. It hasn’t the faintest idea how to go about taking a program like hybrid mail to the point of profitability.
The postal service does have a role in hybrid mail. Its core mission is delivering hard-copy messages, and so its main interest should be in delivering the hard-copy messages a hybrid mail system can create. It should want the postage that hybrid mail could make possible. But that’s a far cry from wanting to take on the manufacturing of these messages, particularly when there are ample private sector interests willing to risk private (and not postal rate payer) capital to see if hybrid mail has any real value. Rate payers’ dollars are earned at too high a price to justify such folly. It’s time for the USPS to stop the madness.
GENE A. DEL POLITO is president of the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) in Arlington, VA.
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