Tag: USPS

The USPS is ending its sponsorship of celebrated cyclist Lance Armstrong, winner of five consecutive Tour de France races.

The agency has sponsored Armstrong’s pro cycling team for eight years and will continue to do so through the end of 2004. Spokesman Gerry McKiernan said the agency has decided to go “in another direction” with its advertising. Asked if that meant some other sport relationship, he said “it’s possible.”

Cycling is popular in Europe and postal officials had sponsored Armstrong’s team in an effort to increase their international business.

A new threshold for machine read barcodes on flat-size mail will be crossed on July 31. That’s the date the United States Postal Service begins to require a 90 percent rate of readability of barcodes in order to qualify for lower rates. This read rate, increased from the current 80 percent-is evaluated by the Postal Service’s MERLIN (Mailing Evaluation and Readability Lookup Instrument) system. Letter- sized mailing rates remain at 90 percent, the threshold set when MERLIN was deployed in 2001.

The U.S. Postal Service’s Carrier Pickup program expands next week for a total of 204,000 city and rural carrier routes, Postmaster General John E. Potter told the postal service’s Board of Governors at its monthly meeting. Carrier Pickup lets customers go online to request next-day package pickups. There is no pickup fee because packages are picked up from customers as part of the carrier’s normal delivery route. Packages must be prepared with the appropriate postage and ready to go before they are picked up.