August 31, 2017

The following notes come to us from our MTAC representative Deb Damore, of Fairrington Transportation, and her participation at the August 22-23 MTAC meeting.

Pricing

USPS VP of Pricing and Costing, Sharon Owens, shared pricing signals for rates they plan to file this fall. The implementation of the rates is scheduled for January 21, 2018

• Increase: 2%, + – 1%
• USPS Promotions: No promotions were approved prior to the departure of the last Board of Governors. They are not allowed to extend the current promotions or move forward with proposed ones until they have at least one Governor.
• Dropship Discounts for Letters: – the discounts for dropship continue to tighten.
• Nonprofit: will receive a higher than average increase.

Shared by Class – the following is a subset of Owen’s slides

• Pricing Strategy – Overview
  • Most products 2% increase + – 1%
  • Maintain key rate relationships for stability and gauge market response
  • Address workshare discounts over 100%
    • Bring most pass-through to or below 100%
    • Justify those that remain over 100%
• Marketing Mail

• • Letters – Most categories increase near CPI
  • High Density Letters – Above average to shrink gap between HD and 5 D
    • Narrow letter dropship as required by PRC
      • Commitment to reduce pass-through by at least 10%
  • Nonprofit – NP Letters receive higher than average increase
  • Carrier Route, HD and Sat. Flats – below average increases, encourage continued mail use for marketing
    • Spread between presort levels (5D DSCF) may widen
  •  – 105% of Cap
    • Presort Gaps maintained current levels
• Periodicals

• Inside County – received average increase
• Outside County
  • Pound Rate – no increase
  • Piece Rate, Bundle and Sack Element – above average increase

Volumes and Service

• The USPS reported that FCM volume for the year-to-date through its Quarter 3 (ended June 30, 2017) is down about 2 billion pieces (4% decline)
• USPS Marketing Mail volumes are down about 1 billion pieces compared to the same period last year.
• USPS reported record high service performance for USPS Marketing Mail and Periodicals (overall scores) for Quarter 3.

Informed Visibility

• Informed Visibility tracking is now available to all mailers, and not just pilot participants.
• IV mail tracking is free as long as you keep a 95% full service threshold.
• Everything in legacy IMB tracking will be running in parallel with IV for September, October, and November
• Anyone that receives IMb Tracing data from USPS must switch to the new Informed Visibility platform by November 30^th extended past the previously announced 9/30/17 cut off).

⇒  The USPS has committed that it will NOT be mandating any change to the Indicia from Standard to Marketing mail prior to January 2019.

⇒   Bob Schimek of Satori, representing Idealliance, was elected MTAC Vice Chair.