Trends in Print and Mail

For many reasons, I was excited when the Smithsonian Institution and the US Postal Service (USPS) announced the creation of the National Postal Museum in 1990. I’d been a supporter of the Smithsonian for years, and loved their monthly magazine. My father had been a clerk for the USPS for 25 years. More importantly, he was an avid collector of First Day Issue stamps, going back to 1939. We were both happy to see this museum launched.

In 1993, the National Postal Museum opened their doors to the public. Fittingly, the museum is located in the historic City Post Office Building, which was the Washington, D.C. post office from 1914 through 1986. The museum’s exhibits celebrate philately (stamp collecting) and postal history. Over the last two decades, I’ve been able to visit several times, including as a guest for special USPS events.

But mail is more than just stamps and the US Postal Service. The letters and packages that are delivered each day represent the work of the mailing industry – an industry that supports over 8.4 million jobs and generates over $1.3 trillion in annual sales revenue. An industry with a story that needs to be told. The National Postal Museum agrees.

In the last year, the National Postal Museum has launched an initiative to tell the story of the mailing industry to the public through online and physical exhibits. The project will show how the USPS network helped to build the mailing industry and how the mailing industry adapts and changes to serve the American public’s business and personal communication needs through the Postal Service’s network

My good friend, Karen McCormick, is the liaison between the museum and the industry. This is good news, as Karen is someone who knows and understands our industry. In 1986, Karen founded a mailing company, Fulfillment Express, in Waltham, MA. For 28 years, Karen and her employees printed, stuffed, packed, labeled and metered millions of letters, brochures and packages for their clients. In 2014, Karen integrated her operations with The Field Companies Fulfillment Center Inc., also in Waltham.

Karen gave back to the industry by serving on association boards. She’s been the president of the New England Direct Marketing Association and the local chapter of the Mailing and Fulfillment Services Association. Since 2001, I’ve served on the Greater Boston Postal Customer Council Executive Board with Karen, including the 4 years she was our Industry Co-Chair. She’s the right person for the job.

Karen and the leadership of the National Postal Museum have been reaching out to different industry associations to garner their support for this project. So far, they’ve met with representatives from the Mailers’ Technical Advisory Committee, Volume Mailers Group, PostCom Board Parcel Shippers Association Board and the National Postal Policy Council. Over the next year, Karen will be contacting more associations to gather information and artifacts that represent the history of our industry. This May, they’ll also have a presence at the National Postal Forum in Anaheim, CA.

This is great development for our industry. Too often, mail is marginalized by businesses and society. This project will help tell the important story of how the US Postal Service and the mailing industry are essential parts of our national economy.

You can learn more about the National Postal Museum at their website, or tour the exhibits at 2 Massachusetts Ave., N.E., Washington, DC 20002.

In our last blog post, we discussed how to prepare and publish a Request for Proposal (RFP). This week, we’ll cover the rest of the process, including:

The Request for Proposal (RFP) process is an excellent method to use for selecting vendors and products. You may need to use an RFP for many reasons. The equipment in your shop may be outdated and in need of replacement. New software programs may mean a digital solution to a manual process. You may want to analyze whether outsourcing a particular function will bring savings to your company.

No matter what you purchase – equipment, software or services – how you purchase is more important. You can improve your chances for success by following these steps:

Last week, the U.S. Postal Service (“USPS”) announced the first rate change for 2015. The rate adjustment was filed just days after the Postal Regulatory Commission (“PRC”) published a notice outlining the steps the USPS needed to follow when removing the exigent surcharge they approved in December of 2013.

In August, we published a blog post recommending that mailers budget for a 2% postage rate increase in 2015. A few months later, the USPS announced they wouldn’t file for a January increase and many mailers reduced their 2015 postage budgets accordingly. Those mailers will be facing budget shortfalls as the new rate case brings a 1.9% to 2.7% increase for commercial First Class mailers and an average 1.9% increase for Standard Class mailers beginning April 26, 2015.


Many of the pricing tables in the rate case can cause confusion. The figures in the rate case are based on what mailers would be paying without the exigent rate increase. As such, the tables include pricing that is actually lower than the current rates. For example, here’s the First Class Mail breakout:


Current stamped single piece mail is priced at $0.49 and AADC Automation mail costs $0.406, not $0.47 and $0.389 as shown in the charts. This difference makes it more difficult for mailers to accurately assess the impact of the increase on their budgets. We recommend ignoring the prices and using the percent changes for each category of mail that your company produces. Here’s the chart for Standard Mail:


While better charts will be forthcoming (we hope), mailers need to act now to prepare for the April rate increase. Here are 5 steps every mail operations manager can take now:

Last month, we posted the results of our quality control survey. While none of the responses were surprising, the patterns and differences were thought provoking. The areas that are most notable are:

Several weeks ago, we published an anonymous 8-question survey on quality control in print and mail operations. We asked about how many pieces a company printed and mailed in a year, and how many errors were reported in the last 12 months. For companies that use a service provider, we asked the same questions.

Print quality errors are defined as:

• smudges, smears or damaged paper that causes any field in the print output to be illegible
• incorrect document orientation (i.e. portrait versus landscape or print fields printed upside down)
• printing documents on the wrong form or letterhead
• incorrectly printed fields, omitted fields or transposed fields

Software is everywhere in the print and mail industry business – from file formatting to address management to piece-level tracking. Like the rest of the business world, our industry relies on software packages to help us in our daily jobs.