The Big Fat Marketing Blog

By Larry Riggs

We’ve all been hearing for years about how great it would be to send all correspondence electronically, save trees and money and all that.

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By Larry Riggs

First it was thinking of giving private couriers access to mailboxes. Now we hear the U.S. Postal Service might want to privatize some bulk mail centers it’s not planning to close.

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The Rand Corp. just came out with a study this week advising against giving private courier access to mailboxes, noting that doing so could well jeopardize the security and safety of the mail.

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Predictably, the U.S. Postal Service said it wants to stay in business and keep providing the universal affordable service it always has.

And why not?

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By Larry Riggs

The U.S. Postal Service came out with its five-year plan earlier this month saying in which it said it wants to keep improving service while cutting costs and further automating its operations.

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For years, mail volume has been falling off in the U.S. and it shows no signs of abating. The standard explanation is that this oldest of communications is being supplanted by the electronic.

Well in the rest of the world, it ain’t necessarily so, says the Universal Postal Union.

For one thing, the United Nations agency reported on World Post Day on Oct. 9 that with 6.5 billion items delivered last year, domestic parcel volumes were up 7.9% over what they were just five years before. [The UPU concedes that e-commerce may have had something to do with this].

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