Many mailers know the U.S. Postal Service’s Informed Visibility (IV) product as the latest generation of mail piece tracking, but it is quickly growing into the data distribution pla... View More
It’s common in the retail world for a store to have a special promotion – signage, advertising, and reduced prices – to build sales of a given product or to drive more customers into... View More
We often hear the term Mail.dat® in the mailing industry, but what exactly is it, and why is it important? Mail.dat is an industry standard database file set that consists of detailed presor... View More
It is amazing (and a little disheartening) what some organizations can overlook regarding how they are managing their permit spends. This lack of oversight can lead to overspending, funding is... View More
Prisoners on bread and water get just the minimum to stay alive. For whatever reason, their wardens won’t simply kill them, but they won’t restore them to health, either. The current way the... View More
The USPS delivers over 484.8 million pieces of mail on a daily basis. Did you know that the USPS tracks every single piece that they process and deliver every day? Every billing statement, sub... View More
Depending on who’s telling the story, postage prices may rise by a little or a lot, or may not, because the Postal Service will go broke otherwise, or it won’t. Any ratepayer would be confus
The COVID-19 pandemic is all but certain to have a severe, negative financial impact on the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), significantly accelerating when it will face a liquidity crisis and be u... View More
The Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) on December 5, 2019, issued its long-awaited next step on its statutorily mandated “10-year” review of the Postal Service’s rate system. A Look... View More
The United States Postal Service (USPS) has announced the incentive/promotion programs for 2020. These promotion programs began in 2011 with the first QR barcode incentive and have continued w... View More
The Postal Service’s financial woes are well known. The problems are complex, but some say postal banking could be a new revenue stream that helps the USPS out of its money problems... View More
For the past 20 years, I have been creating comparison charts that go over the changes in rates in order to show our clients how it will affect budgets. It’s important to understand that whe... View More
On August 13, the United States Postal Service (USPS) filed a notice with the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) of its intent to test-market a new product called Plus One. This is an experime... View More
Recently, we were asked how long it is necessary to retain data. This, of course, begged the question, what data? The answer in all cases is: all the files that would be needed to recreate all... View More
For decades, 2020 has been a time marker used for futuristic changes, the rise of technology, human advancement, and more. In 1997, Wired magazine picked 2020 as the year when “humans arrive... View More
In separate orders, the Postal Regulatory Commission has approved price changes for 2020 for USPS competitive products and most market-dominant products, but rejected the Postal Service’s pr... View More
As mailers head into 2020, a key resolution on their list may be to streamline their mailing and shipping operations, and the United States Postal Service introduced a new offering earlier thi... View More
As touted, the Postal Service has created their own omnichannel tool for mail with the development of the Informed Delivery platform. From all accounts, the Informed Delivery (ID) program, whi... View More
In a September 13 decision, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit granted a petition for review of the Postal Regulatory Commission’s November 13, 2018, order approving the postage pric... View More
I remember when I first started to learn the basics of mail and, later, about the advantages of transporting mail pieces for entry at destinations closer to where the mail pieces would be delivered in
