Tag: USA

Postal Service and Letter Carriers Union reach tentative contract agreement

Posted by | Jul 12, 2007 | |

The U.S. Postal Service and the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) have reached a tentative agreement on a five-year contract. If ratified by union members, the agreement will run through Nov. 20, 2011, and affect approximately 222,000 career employees who deliver mail to residences and businesses on city delivery routes.

“Upon ratification, this agreement will benefit the Postal Service, our customers and employees,” said Doug Tulino, Postal Service vice president for Labor Relations. “It addresses important issues related to labor costs, revenue and delivery operations. While long in the making, we believe that this agreement will prove to be in the best interests of all concerned.”

The Postal Service and the NALC had been scheduled to enter into binding interest arbitration later this year after being unable to reach a new tentative contract. If the current tentative agreement is ratified, the arbitration will not be needed. The Postal Service and the NALC formally opened national contract negotiations in August, 2006.

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DHL launches ShipRush

Posted by | Jul 12, 2007 | |

DHL introduced ShipRush, the software tool designed for people to ship directly from several popular software applications. ShipRush for DHL gives shippers an easy and efficient way to ship via DHL by seamlessly integrating with their preferred business software.

Shippers using QuickBooks(R), eBay(R) or Microsoft Outlook will be able to ship directly to contacts within those applications without re-keying address data in a separate shipping system. ShipRush for DHL eliminates the need to copy and paste addresses or to export and import customer information in order to ship.

ShipRush for DHL processes all DHL domestic Express and Ground shipments, while providing greater accuracy by pulling the address directly from the customer’s software or Outlook application. In addition to printing a DHL shipping label from their own application, shippers using the new product can track and view shipments, print shipment activity reports, send automatic email notifications to recipients with the tracking number, and access discounted rates with a DHL account number.

ShipRush for DHL also downloads addresses from QuickBooks or Microsoft Outlook, and pulls PayPal confirmed addresses directly from eBay. The software can run on any PC or over a customer’s local network so it is accessible to multiple users.

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Industry Document Trends – Transactional Mail

Posted by | Jul 11, 2007 | |

Dear Paul,

TransPromo documents are gaining momentum and something every company should be looking at as a vehicle to more effectively communicate with your customers.

As an association and a provider of educational forums this is the number one topic requested by our members and industry professionals to include in our programming.

The reasons are evident if you look at the results of recent surveys conducted by InfoTrends:

Consumers when asked if they have a preference for receiving traditional statements or personalized statements that contain some relevant and/or useful information to the recipients, the majority (63%) voted for the TransPromo document.
36% of survey respondents indicated that they are already combining marketing messages with their transaction data and presenting the two in one printed document, and another 33% stated that they plan to do so within the next 5 years.
Of 212 document owners who were responsible for the purchase and/or development of direct mail programs.
27% indicated that they are currently including transactional information in their direct mail documents
and an additional 24% plan to do so by 2010.

As an educational sponsor of the upcoming InfoTrends Transpromo Summit, being held in New York August 22 – 23 rd Xplor members are eligible for special member discounts.

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Package-laden FedEx truck burns

Posted by | Jul 11, 2007 | |

Hundreds of packages shipped via FedEx were damaged in a truck fire on the Gulf Freeway near Reveille early Wednesday morning.

Whether any customers lost irreplaceable items was unknown, but FedEx’s package-tracking system allows the company to notify every shipper of the incident, said David Westrick, a spokesman for the ground transportation division of FedEx. That process began Wednesday morning, he said.

The trailer burned about 2:30 a.m. when traveling from a Dallas FedEx ground hub to Houston, Westrick said. How many of the 800 packages on board were damaged or destroyed was unknown Wednesday, Westrick said.

FedEx plans to expedite loss claims related to the fire, Westrick said. The cause of the fire is being investigated.

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Senator McHugh bill would stop mail-order cigarettes at USPS

Posted by | Jul 11, 2007 | |

Rep. John McHugh has again introduced legislation that would outlaw the mailing of tobacco products through the US Postal Service.

If passed, the bill, H.R. 2932, would amend Title 39 of the United States Code, restricting the USPS from delivering certain tobacco products. The bill provides that cigarettes, smokeless tobacco and roll-your-own-tobacco are nonmailable matter, would not be carried or delivered by mail and would be disposed of as the Postal Service directs. It also imposes a penalty of USD 100,000 for each violation.

All three major shipping companies — DHL, FedEx and UPS — have stopped shipping cigarettes nationwide and, as a result, all Internet tobacco vendors are using the USPS to make their deliveries. In addition, in January 2006, Philip Morris USA reached an agreement with a coalition of 37 attorneys general aimed at combating the sale of the company’s cigarettes over the Internet and through the mail. And, in March 2005, the attorneys general also announced that the major credit card companies had all agreed to stop processing credit card payments for the Internet retailers.

Matt Lavoie, press secretary to McHugh, said that McHugh had planned to attach the bill to postal reform legislation that was passed last year during conference negotiations but was unable to because a conference never took place. As a result, the bill never passed.

Other senators have introduced similar bills over the years, but they also never passed.

The USPS has said it has continued to ship cigarettes because, under postal law, packages are sealed against inspection unless there is probable cause.

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