Extending An Olive Branch p.

By: Tony Case

Extending An Olive Branch p.
'I hate to see us lose you as customers,' U.S. Postal Service
executive tells National Newspaper Association members
"IT'S A TRAGEDY to see community newspapers divorcing themselves from the Postal Service," a U.S. Postal Service executive said at the National Newspaper Association convention last month in Cincinnati.
Newspapers and the Postal Service have been business partners about 200 years, said Scott Hamel, manager of the service's Rates and Classification Center in Virginia, at a session titled "USPS: We Want You and Your Business!"
"I hate to see us lose you as customers," he said as he showed slides outlining the benefits of using the Postal Service. "It really gets me down inside."
More and more, publications are seeking alternate means of delivery. NNA has started a service to assist papers wanting to deliver magazines, advertising and product samples to their subscribers (E&P, Sept. 11, p. 36).
While the loss of business is "fundamentally the fault of the Postal Service," the agency is working hard to improve service and simplify regulations, Hamel said.
When publications stop using the Postal Service, the whole industry suffers, he said, as those that leave give up service and those that stay see their postal rates increase as volume diminishes.
Postal Service senior marketing specialist Ernest E. Harris Jr. told the conventioneers that he and his colleagues were "very serious" about serving community-newspaper customers better.
"We're not happy with our performance levels in dealing with small and medium publications and we feel we can do a better job," he said, noting that small and medium-sized papers and magazines account for 72% of all publications that the Postal Service handles.
The service is "going through an evolution, really a revolution, that we've never faced before. We are in real competition and we are fighting for our lives, basically, in terms of serving our customer base," he said.
"We're not assuming that we have any monopoly. We're not assuming that we have any of the advantages that we had. We're trying to look at it in terms of a real business."
Harris called competition from alternate-delivery companies "very real" and said the service is working to simplify procedures, improve payment and document-exchange systems, and perfect service monitoring to keep its customer base.
It also is evaluating the possibility of offering early-morning delivery, guaranteeing delivery before 6:30 a.m. weekdays and 8:30 a.m. weekends 365 days a year.
"We're all concerned about the bottom line . . . and if we can help you grow in your business and make money, then we feel [early delivery] would be a good thing for us to get into," he said, adding that there is no guarantee that the post office will provide the service.
Several NNA convention attendees let Harris know what they thought about his agency's service.
One publisher said she discovered that some papers were being delivered two and three to a household and some copies were delivered several weeks late.
Another conventioneer told Harris, "You're talking about same-day delivery and we're talking about same-week."
The postal representative responded, "I hear you."
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