With the press of the holiday business now behind us, we'll be looking back, like the rest of the business world, to evaluate how things went. My feeling, no hard numbers yet, is that volume, especially parcel volume, was down. The way mail is processed now days it is harder at the delivery office level, to get a feel for things unless you are a carrier.
So my seat of the pants evaluation of letter/flat volume would be of little value. However, parcels are still sorted by hand at the delivery office so I can evaluate volume much better. To other clerks, supervisors and managers, and myself the feeling is that parcel volume is down over SPLY (Same Period Last Year). If that is the case, and for it to be as noticeable as it was for us, the downturn has to be significant.
If this is true, the Postmaster General Potter’s commitment to hold rates till 2006 is going to be sorely tested. Productivity gains will be increasingly harder to achieve and there is less than full confidence that the plan to fully automate flat mail will reach full implementation. If sufficient productivity gains can not be achieved to offset possible revenue losses, management will be reevaluating the plan for the balance of this year and the years to come, probably adjusting work hours, capital expenditures, and so forth downward.
We've already cut pretty close to the bone in a lot of areas. While there are more consolidation of processing centers to go, there is a lot that can be saved through consolidation of many of the small, none contributing (net loss revenue) offices. The problem here is congress. Whenever we try to close these types of offices the patrons petition their congressman who gets on the phone with the PMG and ultimately puts a stop to it.
We cannot operate under good business principles with congress involved. (Surprised?) It's not that service would discontinue to these customers, they already have free home delivery available which would continue and they would be able to move their PO Box to another office it they needed one. The biggest objection is loss of community identity. Well, if that is dependent on the presence of a post office...need I say more.
The competition, UPS, FedEx and so forth have been lobbying congress heavily to prevent any reform plan from going forward that would allow the postal service to compete on a level field. They were able to hold up Rep. John Mc Hughs house committee that was making great progress until his term as chair was up and the process had to essentially start over.
Delivery services like UPS and Airborne are able to transfer delivery of non-productive areas to us by drop shipping deliveries to sparsely populated rural areas at the local post office for delivery. We always go by every delivery point on the route and gladly take their revenue. That revenue helps us, but we cannot, because of congress, consolidate where these other services can.
I don't want to see delivery service discontinued to certain areas, I just want us to be able to do so efficiently. Until congress is out of the decision making process, efficiency will be difficult to come by in these critical areas.