House and Senate sources said Wednesday postal restructuring bills probably would not be introduced until next week.
House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., and Senate Governmental Affairs Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, originally had planned to introduce postal legislation by the end of April. But Collins acknowledged she would wait until next week to introduce her bill with Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreIBM have announced that its consulting division, Business Consulting Services, has been awarded a contract by International Post Corporation (IPC) to help them transform and manage UNEX, an Internet-based quality measurement system for the international postal organisation. The new measurement system will allow postal operators to be more responsive and react quickly to deteriorating delivery times, and facilitates the speedy settling of accounts between the countries’ postal operators. IBM and IPC aim to have the system fully operational by 2005. In order to achieve this, more than a half-million test letters will be sent between 36 countries every year.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreDirect mail is the focal point of a new advertising campaign the U.S. Postal Service have launched. The campaign demonstrates just how influential mail can be in a multi-channel marketing campaign and will appear in major marketing and business publications.
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