January 28, 2015

Today, the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers asked the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) to pose questions to the United States Postal Service (USPS) regarding “several apparent anomalies in the prices proposed by the Postal Service for Nonprofit Standard Mail.”

• One set of questions is related to the law that requires the average revenue per piece of Nonprofit Standard Mail to be equal, as nearly as practicable, to 60% of the corresponding commercial mail. The rate case filed by USPS calculated the ratio of Nonprofit Standard Mail to commercial Standard Mail revenue per piece at 60.4%.
• We also posed questions about one large price increase for automation Nonprofit Standard Mail letters presorted to the 5-digit level and entered at Destination Sectional Center Facilities (DSCF). The price for these letters is proposed to rise 5.1% which is 2.8 times larger than the average 1.835% increase in all Standard Mail letters.
• And we asked whether two important dropship discounts for commercial automation letters are larger for commercial automation letters than for nonprofit automation letters.

Here is a link to today’s filing by the Alliance at the PRC: Alliance PRC Filing

The Alliance also participated in a filing about the new flats pricing. We stated that the USPS has not provided sufficient information regarding its newly proposed flats rate cells to confirm that the Standard Mail and Periodicals price increases comply with the CPI cap. We asked for time to comment after sufficient information is presented by the USPS: Mailers PRC Filing