Posted on 05/04/2012 9:39:34 AM PDT by SmithL
WASHINGTON — With financial losses mounting, the nearly bankrupt U.S. Postal Service is urging the House to quickly pass legislation that would give it wide authority to close thousands of low-revenue post offices, reduce labor costs and end Saturday delivery.
At its meeting Friday, the Postal Service's board of governors said that a bill passed by the Senate last week doesn't go far enough to give the agency the latitude it needs. That bill would provide the Postal Service with an $11 billion cash infusion to help pay down ballooning debt but halt the immediate closing of up to 252 mail-processing centers and 3,700 post offices.
The Postal Service called the closings a critical part of its cost-cutting plan to save some $6.5 billion a year and regain profitability by 2015. Anxious for legislative action but uncertain when the House may act, the mail agency says it will proceed with its planned closings after May 15, but in a "methodical and measured" way that considers the special needs of rural communities.
"The bottom line is that the Senate bill does not provide the Postal Service with the flexibility and speed that it needs to have a sustainable business model,"
(Excerpt) Read more at knoxnews.com ...
"The bottom line is that the Senate bill does not provide the Postal Service with the flexibility and speed that it needs to have a sustainable business model,"The Senate bill was never intended to be a business model. It was a purely political model.
Yet, somehow companies like Federal Express, UPS, DHL and others are growing.
Must be a fluke, eh?
Why don’t you start moving like you have something accomplish?
I swear, I don’t go to the PO very often but, when I do it seems you’all move like a herd of turtles addled with arthritis in the middle of a January winter...
It helps that they are not required by Congress to overfund their pension fund to the tune of almost seven billion like the USPS has to. If Congress will just get rid of that ridiculous requirement, the USPS will not be in a crisis situation.
I guarantee you'd see a lot more speed and action at around 4AM on the workroom floor of a general mail facility. Never a dull moment when dispatch time approaches.
BTW, UPS was a local deliverybusiness in the PAC NW. A bunch of postal headquarters fellows bought it years ago when Congress refused to let the Post Office Department modernize parcel operations.
I think they did quite well don't you? And that Fed Ex idea? That came mostly from the Postmaster at Gary Indiana. His kid was Bob Smith's roommate.
Darn, I hate it when that happens ~ some postal worker gets a good idea. Don't you?
Volumes are shrinking at these companies. But they are flexing downward to remain profitable in an economic downturn, and their higher-yield, specialty products are growing.
Cut half the staff and deliver mail on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That’ll work.
Q: Part of the lore of FedEx is that you wrote a term paper while a grad student at Yale that first explored the idea of an overnight-delivery service -- and that you received a C from a skeptical professor. Was that term paper truly the genesis of FedEx?
A: The question is prescient because there wasn't a single "eureka" moment. The original idea for FedEx came when I wrote a term paper as an undergraduate -- not as a graduate student, because I never went to graduate school -- about a very simple observation: As society automated, as people began to put computers in banks to cancel checks -- rather than clerks -- or people began to put sophisticated electronics in airplanes -- society and the manufacturers of that automated society were going to need a completely different logistics system.
That was becoming obvious to me both from just reading about it from an academic standpoint, and in those days I used to fly -- I was a charter pilot at the Tweed New Haven airport. I flew around to those airports up there, and all those high-tech companies, including IBM (IBM ) and Xerox (XRX ), that's what their pilots used to talk about -- what a difficult proposition it was to keep their field-service engineers and their parts and logistics systems operating. In fact, a lot of the corporate airplanes up there were doing nothing more than flying [computer] parts and pieces around...when the computer would break down.
That was the paper, and the whole issue about the C on the grade, came from naivete on my part when I was talking to a reporter years and years ago, and he asked what I made. I said, "I don't know, probably made my usual C."
FedEx Fred Smith interview with Businessweek
I'm not seeing the tie-ins with the Post Office you mentioned.
Those companies are not being forced to keep nonprofitable operations up and running by force of law, either, as the article describes. The USPS has requested this kind of flexibility so they can restructure into a profitable business model and are being denied this by Congress.
You’ve never talked to the folks involved have you.
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