Fixing the Mail: Neither Snow nor Rain nor…Red Ink?

Congress has a plan to reform the Postal Service's burdensome retiree funding, and experts have lots of ideas on how to run the agency competitively

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The U.S. Postal Service, long beset by financial woes, has recently felt the pinch even more acutely. On Aug. 5, the agency reported a $2.4 billion loss for its most recent quarter, a gush of red ink that is expected to total some $7.1 billion for the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. The Government Accountability Office recently placed the Postal Service on its "high risk" list as "an organization vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement," needing broad reforms.

Aggravating matters is that even when the U.S. economy turns around and mail volume rebounds, deep structural problems make it likely that the Postal Service won't benefit much. That's because even though the recession has curtailed second-class business mailings—the so-called junk mail Americans toss daily—much of the trouble stems from the agency's inability to change as mail has decreased, industry analysts say.

"The Postal Service needs to get out a blank sheet of paper and think about a new business model," says Steve Goodrich, president of the Center for Organizational Excellence, a consulting firm in Washington, D.C.

A Plan to Reform Health-Care Benefits

Now, however, there's some indication that Congress and agency leaders are beginning to contemplate innovations. First on the agenda is an effort by U.S. Postmaster General John E. Potter to have Congress pass the Postal Service Retiree Health Funding Reform Act, introduced in July by Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.).

The legislation would "restructure the aggressive retiree health pre-funding schedule that was imposed on it in 2006," Carper said in a statement at an Aug. 4 hearing on the agency. Since 2006, the Postal Service has been required to pay more than $5 billion annually to pre-fund retirees' future health-care obligations. That mandate, coupled with a decline of roughly 38 billion pieces of mail since 2007, has left the Postal Service struggling. "A number of factors—including the economic downturn and competition from Internet communications—have left the U.S. Postal Service financially crippled," Lieberman said in a July news release.

Goodrich and other business-practice experts suggest a number of ways for the Postal Service to dig out of its hole, apart from the traditional practice of raising stamp prices to bolster revenues. Some of the ideas: selling cell phones and other nontraditional products and services in post offices, further reducing the agency's 625,000-employee head count; trimming retiree health benefits; allowing competition from private enterprise, as many European postal systems do; and exploiting the electronic-mail revolution as e-mails continue to replace physical first-class mail.

Potter strongly favors the idea that USPS retail outlets follow the example of many countries around the world by branching into new products—as well as restoring banking services, which were offered in U.S. post offices until the 1960s. "In Australia if you want to renew a driver's license, more than likely you can go to a post office. In Japan, you go to a post office to get life insurance. In Italy, you do banking at post offices. In France you can buy prepaid cell phones in [the] post office," says Potter. "We haven't spent a nickel to research what you can sell in our post offices. We need to. Any business that faces substitution must diversify to generate revenue. Phone companies went from landlines to cell phones, and now they're into cable."

Ron Wiener, who heads Seattle-based Venture Mechanics, which funds and advises technology startups, agrees that the current mix of retail products at the post office represents a huge lost opportunity. The Postal Service—which sells little beyond stamps and padded envelopes—has no method to consider which merchandise is best suited to different areas. Compare that, says Wiener, who founded Earth Class Mail, a Seattle-based provider of online postal boxes and mail-forwarding services, "to Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), for example, where you have merchandising experts analyzing everything every day."