PowerMailing for the Twenty-Ought-Ones

The US Postal Service should be run by the Americans who use it and pay for it, America's Mailers, acting for and on behalf of their customers, who are your company and its employees. These mail users don't need help from Washington, who have driven our prices up and our hopes down. If you want to again see a 25 cent postal stamp, and forward progress for our nation, then please read on. Thank you.

Budgeting and processing requirements for the preparation of successful mailing projects have been changed during the twenty-oughts by fiscal pressures on mailing entities.

This is the current period for our forward planning, 2003 and beyond.

Because postal delivery expenses have risen as a fixed part of every completed mailing, postal customers are necessarily compelled to reduce waste and ineffective postal use to a minimum exposure. Wastes in excess of very slight proportions can sap potential mail-use gains in a futile and exhaustive exercise of mailing with the hope of achieving breakeven success.

We at mail-production.com/ are optimistic as never before in considering the vast opportunities present for the enlightened of the well-prepared mailing client. The successful use of the USPS is poised at the forward edge of a new frontier, and we see new ways of mapping victory marches into this new frontier daily. More and more mail is disappearing from the mailstreams, as ill-prepared and unaware customers nationwide fail to meet the complexity challenges of mailing, or PowerMailing, in this amazing landscape of trap, trip or triumph.

mail-production.com/ has honed its sights on trimming or repairing the causes of these use losses by advancing a high degree of successful corrective measures. These include name- and address repair, highly-skilled mailfile hygienics, all provided in combination with in-depth address delivery verifications, as enabled by the USPS's 2001 release of its long-withheld and highly secret Delivery Sequence File (DSF) for all USA final delivery units. This postal resource, available under strict licensing restrictions, carries mailing-address verification to a new and never-before attainable perfection, all the way down to the final secondary delivery specification for the actual suites, lots, floors and rooms where mail is handed off to addressees.

Astonishingly, direct mail authors have published views on levels of list accuracy that warn of waste ranging to the fiftieth percentile. This breakdown from Melissa Data Corp., a California-based software provider, suggests the averages shown below, while the USPS has estimated address data-fault errors at the high proportion of 23.6%, including movers.

Estimations for Spring, 2003, http://www.melissadata.com/

It should be noted that mail-production.com/ routinely processes the mailfiles of conscientious owners with a DPV-to-TOTAL ratio of 47:50 or greater (94% DPV). It is difficult to imagine how any mailer can sustain a mailing waste on the order of twenty percent or greater. But, doubtless, any degree of mailing waste is a direct detriment to a mailer's initiatives toward improved earnings, cost reductions, or the operating within budgetary guidelines.

First-Class Postage Rates Since 1845

Prior to the middle of the 19th century, rates were based on the number of sheets in a letter and the distance it was traveling. In 1845, rates were based on the weight of a letter and the distance it was going.

Beginning in 1863, domestic letter rates became ``uniform,'' that is, they were based solely on weight, regardless of distance. The chart below lists postage in cents per ounce delivered.

Because the USPS is a government-sponsored bureaucratic monopoly, unresponsive to any market reality, except decline in its revenues, postage rates rose at their highest inclinations ever during the 1990's, a decade which saw dramatic price reductions in all other components of manufactured direct mail.

US First Class Postal Rates

Effective Date	First Oz.	Add'l. Oz.
March 3, 1863	3 (1/2 Oz)	*
March 3, 1883	2 (1/2 Oz)	*
July 1, 1885	2	*
November 3, 1917	3	*
July 1, 1919	2 (-33.3%)	*
July 6, 1932	3	*
August 1, 1958	4	*
January 7, 1963	5	*
January 7, 1968	6	*
May 16, 1971	8	*
March 2, 1974	10	*
September 14, 1975	10	9
December 31, 1975	13	11
May 29, 1978	15	13
March 22, 1981	18	17
November 1, 1981	20	17
February 17, 1985	22	17
April 3, 1988	25	20
February 3, 1991	29	23
January 1, 1995	32	23
January 10,1999	33	22
January 5, 2001	34	23
June 30, 2002	37	23
Month 1, 2004	25 (-33.3%)	17

Tools for Nonprofit Mailers, http://www.nonprofitmailers.org/tools.html/

* -- add the price of another letter

Consumer Price Index versus Postal Use Costs

mail-production.com/ here presents a first-of-its-kind direct comparison of postal rates with the National Consumer Price Index, Bureau of Labor Statistics--CPI Structure. We have found this comparison revealing in a number of ways. But viewers can see the alarming trend set forth in the escalation ratios for past three decades of summary, arriving at worst-ever 1:4.4 ratio for the period ending 1999.

For the future well-being of the postal institution as we have known it for over 100 years, it is very much incumbent upon all members of the postal-users forum, and the economy of the US in general, to take back our rights in its forward management, and to finally begin to balance the use-cost equasion with a demand for accountability and growth of volume, as well as improved service and reliability. This can now only be accomplished by fully disclosing the failed pseudo-scientific systems upon which billions have been expended for the benefit of special-interest suppliers who have vended the failed equipment and false-benefit doctrines that have sustained them.

In a forward-moving economy of ever-increasing direct-marketing sales, the suggestion that we will, can, or should suffer any volume loss is to be rejected for the falsehood that it is. We can secure the proper mechanics for the USPS by streamlining its delivery practices with workable routing schemes and logical labor relations. To restore the billions of dollars of heretofore lost revenue, we can install aggressive use-cost reductions designed to bring the service the kinds and types of mails that bolster the marketing efforts of millions of commercial users, and as well answer the environment issues brought forth by the aggressive increases in the materials it transports.

These solutions are readily at hand for us, without the forced privatizing of the service that some are advocating. It is far better to correct the service, in its current place, than to turn over a broken and unprofitable failure to the confusion of a group of diversified private owners. The risk that the ``private solution'' could fail, or meet with resistance, is too large for us to gamble, especially while considering that the service has never had the good fortune of being fully administered by the commercial users who support and use it.

We believe these users, who in this era prepare all large mailings, know best how to refine and restore the kinds of delivery successes the nation enjoyed for ten decades, especially in the rejection and orderly uninstallation of the sideways mechanisms that have hampered us during the past twenty-five years of forced implementation.

The era of abandoning the service to special interests who are either selling equipment, or seeking the demise of the service for other reasons, must be drawn to a close. This is because the false managers have used all the slack that can be extended them. There is no further room for the continuation of their pattern errors in our secured, successful future.

In a true sense, the end of the line as arrived, and there is no more monetary rope to extend them. Mail users must step in to provide the concrete steps that are to be followed, such that we can pattern the service after the order of the same user's production plants; and that includes a no-nonsense attitude toward the moving of mailing materials to addressees in ways proven cost-effective and efficient by years and years of applied use.

Following the decade of the sixties, and especially solidifying in the mid-seventies as preparation for ZIP+4 was revealed by the special-interest managers (in lieu of their following and improved the use of the ``carrier route'' method for refining preparation) there has been an adversarial relationship struck between the service and its customers. For any who have been in the service, or in private mail preparation during this time, this ``war of the worlds'' cannot be denied, nor even doubted.

Parenthetically, let us add that many American do not understand ZIP+4 even today, after two decades of forced ``use.'' Its numbering basis is a highly inadequate numbering flux having nothing to do with the mail user's understood locality, postal station, home address or letter carrier, although it purports to categorize building interiors with its 99-slot capability, which is quite impossible and illogical, except perhaps in rural Nebraska. Oddly, the service's recent reversion to the quite logical DPV method for the needed address-correction measures that automation relies upon can be seen as a very-belated admission of systemwide failure. The culmination of this incalculably expensive mistake (stamps up from 10- to 37 cents) and its final death knell is the long-awaited ELOT system of conjoining the DPV and Delivery Routes schema into a compact, step-by-step refinement which accurately defines every postal destination. It yet remains for us to fully unbundle ELOT from ZIP+4 and provide a user-readable ZIP Extenstion System that can print on and direct every piece of USPS mail. See below: How To Do It.

To be brief on the point of adverse raletions, and lengthy topics could be studied about it, let us agree that from these hostilities all the ills of our current situation have sprung. It would take no studied master to calculate the effects of any customer-against-supplier war at any level. This was partly endowed because the customers had no alternative service to patronize and had to make do. Such would not have been the predicted outcome in a city of 2,000,000 when a certain grocery company let their less-than ``you're welcome'' sentiments become whole-heartily felt by that part of the city's marketplace they dealt with as ``their own.''. It is illustrations such as this that privatizers use to convey their dismantlement desires. But we must calculate further.

The Post Office is a Public Trust, of and for the benefit of our nation's people. The people own it. Those who would rush to sell it to private owners in a shambles, in a sort of emergency-discount fire sale, are working against that public trust. They want to sell a used car without first washing and waxing it in the way we see so many dealers cleaning up their lots. Those dealers probably don't enjoy car washing any better than the rest of us, but they know what moves cars at beneficial prices.

My point is simply this. There is little wrong with the service today, and this is because the good people who work there have rejected the hostility doctrines of the past and welcomed customers back; and we truly have good relations with the service now, such as were lacking for parts of the past before this change occurred. The business people who want to buy the service at a bargain know this. They know it well.

We will be remiss as a nation to fold the service down and hand it to new owners, depriving ``the people'' their profit, if we don't wash, wax and tune-up the vehicle now, before the sale. Further, it is well within our means and knowledge to do all of this. We must just not let the smart talkers who think otherwise, for their great gain, talk us out of this wise sale preparation.

In 1967 basis dollars, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose in this proportion to First Class Mail Rates (FCM) for three decades beginning in 1970:

CPI Estimations: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Office of Management and Budget.

Scientifically Controlled Analysis:

escalation of postal rates,
did spin,
have spun,
and are spinning,
dreamily out of control.

Direct Mail -- `Too Good To Be True'

FCM Postage ranks highly among those commodities that affect overall price inflation.

Such categories as Food, Health, Energy, Lending Rates and Monetary Inflation (devaluation of the dollar's buying power) are central elements in measuring the costs of all goods and services that we use and live by. FCM affects other prices directly because it is a fixed ingredient in the business operations of all industries and institutions. In our fully matured and ``diversified'' marketplace, mail delivery is the primary vehicle in bringing forth a large portion of US consumer goods and services through US Postal home- and business-to-business delivery.

The proportion of goods directly sold is soaring with success within our highly skilled and micro-targeted marketing environment. It can be expected, with good reason, to continue its ascent to market superiority because of its unparalleled ability to cut waste in search of the success and viability that general retailing suffers to find knocking on the doors of its fixed store locations.

In reviewing the landscape, outlined below, we can bear in mind that each pitfall and shortcoming identifies, to us, a proposed solution, and new remedy, and a contemplative future of problem conquering that has propelled our methods to the forefront of discovery and leadership so excellent that other ``watchers'' necessarily follow.

As we assess our assets, we find they are many. As we define and confront our obstacles, we learn they are never immovable.

Just taking control for our well-being in the governance of our ``monopoly'' is a single stepping stone from which we can tower above and topple the designs of peril that have harmed us, all hereinafter given account. And every word of truth and encouragement will bolster our cause and give light to the days of reckoning that lie before us as we emerge the prime ``delta force of decisiveness,'' given to the enumeration of answer and purpose specified for foiling the contrived problems within it.

See, also, Living The Lie.

How to do it:

Zone Improvement Plan ~ ZIP Numbering

  components:   a.  23223   is your existing 5-digit code 
                b.  C0250   is your letter carrier, Ex: Mr Jones.
                c.  A500    is your mailstop on Mr. Jones' route.
                d.  A       is your personal identifier, as:

              ending letter A: is your household's Mr. Johnson
              ending letter B: is your household's Mrs. Johnson
              ending letter C: is the first child, and so forth.

            or, for businesses,

              ending letters AA: is your employee Mrs. Williams
              ending letters AC: is your employee Mr. Phillips

            The ending letters are personal identifiers and
            they can be any length needed to fully map your
            address, a through zzz, for 1 through 25974 persons.

            The use of personal identifiers within your household
            or business is strictly optional. They are for the
            arbitrary use and convience of the inhabitants, and
            their meanings are not known by, and are of no concern
            to, the USPS.
     
    Dear Postal Customer:
  
       Your revised ZIP Number is 23223/C025/A500.

       You no longer have a ZIP Code; you have fully
       self-describing ZIP Number.       

       Use this ZIP Number for every piece of mail.

       If you move, register your old ZIP Number to your
       new ZIP Number, so as to inform the USPS that customer
 
          23223/C025/A500A has now moved and is new ZIP Number
          23233/C002/B006A.

       The USPS will forward your mail from old to new for 36
       months, after which your former number will be inactive.

       The person who moves into you former dwelling will have
       a revised ZIP Number different from you old number.
       That person's ZIP Number would be: 23223/C025/B500A.

       If that person in turn moves, the third resident's
       ZIP Number would become: 23223/C025/C500A          
 
       Please feel free to append your suite, apartment, room
       or mailstop designator behind this ZIP Number in this way,
       if you desire to do so:

       23223/C025/A500A STE C
         or
       23223/C025/A500A RM 1006

       This can help your internal mail deliveries within your
       business offices.    

       Thank You.  Happy Mailing.

     A.   Mrs. Sally Jane Dawson
          123 Old Oak Ln.
          Logan, MA 02453/C025/A500A

          or

     B.   Mrs. Sally Jane Dawson
          Logan, MA 02453/C025/A500A

          or

     C.   Logan, MA 02453/C025/A500A

          or

     D.   02453/C025/A500A

We hear remind readers that the miracle of the nineties was far and away the harnessed correction of the imbalances of the preceding time, when the absurd conditions that brought us downward were with great acceptance reversed in a trend of reclamation and recovery, enjoyed by and prospering all, far and wide. The thirty percent CPI calculation noted above in the decades in review highlights the excitement and success of the decade-long movement. All former notions were without argument successfully undone as the costs of goods and services arrived in due course at the prime point for their consumption, many times at large discounts and price points never dreamt possible only months earlier. The working in unison that this ``play or pay'' period produced was and is an underexplored dynamic force of free-market operations all working toward the aid and benefit of every other market component, friend or foe. In a practical sense it was the awakening of the sensibility with us that it's better to prosper at some beginning level (any level given) than to selfishly urge the defeat of any others beside us, for our supposed superior enhancement.

This is the dynamite of corrective power that Direct Mail is burgeoned upon. Remember this as we take a backward glance toward the chambers of dark condemnation, pettiness and fear that propelled among us no outstanding victors, but raised doubt and suspicion on the part of business people, worldwide, such that we can never afford to revisit.

None of this happens by accident. It comes as the result of leadership, charity, and the inspiration for a universal improvement for a world and domestic condition that in every wise outsteps the bounds of the day before. We have been knocked into the dirt by the doers of evil, as we shall not soon forget; but in that act, and any that threaten to follow it, there is peace, harmony and truth of confident victory that no adversary can hope to undercut. The monument for the moment that sacrifice has forestood is the acceptance that from the dirt we will arise, just as those who have died would rejoice in seeing their pain-bought gift to us being opened to the light of full enjoyment, widespread hope and benefit, and the standing memorial their lives have left planted before us.

By any real measure the studies above show that the cost is postage is grossly out of proportion with its ascertained value, based on the costs of all other materials and services. This is found to be true despite the efficiencies that increased pieces per delivery trip have afforded.

For instance, it can been seen in broad terms that a First Class Rate of 15 cents should have been amply sufficient to end the three-decade study period, leaving us a rate of not more than 18 cents today. This means the basic cost of postage is roughly two times its historic price at this time.

Many of the postal price increases have been brought about in answer to losses of delivery volume, and many argue that delivery volume has been assailed by the already grossly overstated prices in effect.

More destructively, the lobbying interests of newspapers, broadcast networks and alternate delivery systems for parcels and overnight envelopes have successfully debased the debate on rates within our governing bodies, because the ``too-good-to-be-true'' benefits of using US Mail for marketing and delivery were out of the reach of competition.

Given the fact that the mail-users' lobby was undefined and invisible, these groups succeeding in disparaging the US Postal Service in every way imaginable, from the naming its product ``junk,'' to the final reckless warping of its price structures. In reality, these counterpoising interests should have received little or no voice in these decisions. It would be the tantamount order to have nearly all debate on airline operations taken over by the railroad- and highway-transportation lobby. Their advice and opinion could just not be heard as sound or useable.

Over very long periods, the price structures of US Mail's subordinate classes, such as those for periodicals and standard-mail, have mirrored the front-line first class rates.

During much of the history of the Post Office, and especially in recent decades, the underclasses have carried and subsidized the front-line price by enabling the carriers to make profitable deliveries of a broad mix of letters items, such that without the mix of magazines and solicitation materials, the front-line price would have naturally risen dramatically. But the same lobbying voices condemned and misrepresented this effect, as well, since their true opponent was the underclass and profit-central large-volume commercial mailers and print publishers.

It can be said of these decades and even unto today, that advertising and marketing arriving in the consumers' hands via direct mail is the only fully prepaid and ``free'' marketing they receive. If the consumer purchases a magazine, it will contain the ads they are buying. And if the consumer watches TV or listens to broadcasts, their time is being undervalued at the pleasure of the broadcast advertiser.

If a TV viewer buys a Super Bowl Ticket, or a new car, a large portion of the price paid goes toward the payment of the not-so-free TV time. In actuality, the seemingly ``free'' aired commercials could in a moment cost the new car owner $2000. Suddenly we begin to understand that the intrusive ads are abundantly more costly than the four minutes they deduct from our schedules, time after time after time. Are you surprised that broadcasters don't want you to become aware? It's really best for them if they can create a diversion.

Expensive luxury brands bear a marketing burden of twenty percent. ($60,000 x .20 = $12,000) Those are some pretty expensive ads to be watching.

But, compared to direct mail, which can be read or not read at a convenient time, the other media presuppose the time and place for their presence. They decide when you will have two minute's spare time to considering their junk-free proposition. They pre-condition the world audience for this fiction by a shameless turning of truth and fact, one pointing to an innocent and irrelevant competitor.

All this adds up to more reason why alternative marketers don't want consumers to learn that ``direct mail is too good to be true.''

It has no user price; it's at the user's leisure; it's materially excellent above all other forms in its individualized correspondence, addressing personally the one-and-only ``you.''  See our ``Gateway to the US Household.''

Direct Mail has within its strengths an effectiveness that enables it to stand alone, generating a profit center by campaign, as opposed to a more nebulous advertising investment, or re-investment, as it were.

The others' respective products cannot match direct mail's perfection, courtesy, or utility.

If we tried to charge our recipient audience, or could manage to have our mail read in the most abrupt interruption of dinner-, reading- or broadcast time, there should be a lobbying outcry against us. Until that time arrives, a large dose of Sam Walton's ``workin' on a roll back'' should be the order of the day.

And for all this our industry harbors no ill will toward all the other forms, old or new. We spend little time in their domains crying foul. We welcome our place among them. We believe there is no more perfect or harmonious marketing plan than that of a well-conducted, multi-media execution. And we ask that our deserved place be cleared of the taint of resentment instilled by the adverse criticisms of others.

What When Wrong: How Did This Happen

Wait a sec.... If this overview can be relegated to a broad analysis of all prices over long periods, maintaining factual certitude without distortion, where are the hidden ``subtle truths'' thus avoided that make this mess more sensible?

That's a question of some merit. Consider this:

Matters of great importance are decided by the acts and actions of peoples doing, saying and believing things for no cause whatsoever, other than their prerogative to say, do, think and act any way they please. Grave decisions and directions have been embarked upon the world over by just such seemingly harmless diversity of opinion. The shaping of opinion, it turns out, is more determinate than any truth or factual refutation. Thus facts are ignored by the mental wanderer, and the gracious impulses of his formed opinion are heartily followed. Would we have but many books of voluminous pages to list the historical accounts of this. For they have continued from the beginning of all records, and are ever-more popular in our modern times.

If it takes no fact or evidence to advance a falsehood, stating its precepts over and over in a ritualistic verbosity until they are held to be those of a prevailing school of thought, then, by all means, say it just the way you like, and present in it just the light that sets it aglow, and behold, others shall thereof adopt it.

This means, in lieu of the application of the effects of the 1934 Corn Blight, this above-described simplistic view of postal rates must be discounted as a fool's attempt to trick a more-knowledgeable world into thinking the matters at hand can be in the grasp of common- or inexperienced practitioners of the arts of our legislative, regulatory and super-fractal persuasions, especially those with God-given credence and wit adept to sit upon these boards with views aright. Thus, and for these reasons, notwithstanding the unexpected rise in imported rubber costs on more than one occasion, we say it isn't so.

For those of you who didn't follow the logic of the preceding paragraph, that's how it's done.

Please follow this discussion forward to our new developments for Enviromail, just published.

Truth or Fiction? See the `Tale of Mrs. Finch' and let us have your verdict!

Copyright  © 2003 mail-production.com^® created 2000 -- last modified 2003-06-01