21st Century Post Office: Opportunities to Share Excess Resources

on Dec 5, 2011 in Ideas Worth Exploring | 3 comments

The U.S. Postal Service owns or leases more than 33,000 facilities with approximately 284 million interior square feet (SF). These facilities are in virtually every community throughout the country and range in size from 55 SF to 32 acres under one roof. We visited 717 of these facilities as part of 10 facility optimization audits and identified over 21 million excess SF of space. During our subsequent national facility optimization audit, we statistically projected that the Postal Service has about 67 million SF of excess space nationwide.

In addition to an abundance of space, recent audits have disclosed that there are unmanned or underused windows in post offices around the nation, as well as more workhours at retail facilities than needed based on fiscal year 2011 workloads.

The solution most often suggested for dealing with these excess resources is to consolidate and close facilities. In fact, the Postal Service is in the process of identifying both retail and mail processing facilities for closure or consolidation.

Can the Postal Service Afford Alaska Bypass?

on Nov 28, 2011 in Pricing & Rates | 14 comments

Have you ever heard of Alaska Bypass? It’s a service the U.S. Postal Service offers only in Alaska, allowing shippers to send shrink-wrapped pallets of goods at Parcel Post rates using private airlines. The Postal Service pays airlines to carry the goods to rural Alaskan communities by delivering these goods directly to the stores located in rural areas. The shippers effectively and entirely “bypass” the Postal Service’s delivery network.

The Postal Service has to pay the airlines much more than it receives in postage for this program. In FY 2010, the Postal Service lost $73 million on Alaska Bypass. In addition, the people receiving the shipments are usually retail merchants, because the orders must be at least 1,000 pounds. The Postal Service doesn’t provide this kind of service for retailers anywhere else in the country. Alaska Bypass began when it was much more difficult to get goods to rural Alaskans than it is today. There are even some that say it no longer seems to fit with the Postal Service’s mission.

Offering eMailboxes to Consumers: An Opportunity for the Postal Service?

on Nov 14, 2011 in Ideas Worth Exploring | 28 comments

Out of 23 posts in industrialized countries, the U.S. Postal Service is one of the few remaining posts not offering an eMailbox solution to its citizens. And while there are private sector technology industry standouts in the U.S. that have developed widely popular e-mail and secure storage services, their business models sacrifice consumer privacy in the interest of ad-based revenue generation.

In an increasingly digital world, it may make sense for the Postal Service to offer eMailbox services in addition to traditional delivery. A consumer would also be able to sign up for an accompanying highly secure data storage area service called the eLockbox, which would provide added security for the archiving of important legal and personal documents with anytime, anywhere secure access. Today many electronic documents, especially financial records, reside primarily on the banks or billers Web site and not with the consumer.