WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill today questioned the U.S. Postal Service’s pricing for its “last mile” of delivery in rural areas, and why she believes it may be losing money by under-charging competitors such as UPS and Fedex to carry mail to those areas.
“I have been on a harangue about giving deals to our competitors,” said McCaskill, a former Missouri State Auditor and senior member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Postal Service. “…We are giving a really good deal to our competitors. I’ve never seen another business entity who says, because we are so starving for volume, we’re going to take the most expensive part of our architecture, which is the last mile, and we’re going to give our competitors a deal on that last mile. And I have yet to have anyone give me the analysis that shows me that they have, in fact, at the Postal Service, considered what price they’re giving to UPS and FedEx for that last mile of delivery as it relates to our costs.”
In January, McCaskill demanded answers from the Postal Service on how it will protect mail delivery for rural Missourians and efficiently manage the cost-sharing benefits with competitors to carry mail the “last mile,” especially in rural areas, saying: “I think it’s really important we get a handle on [rural delivery times]. Those of us who are really pushing to protect rural delivery…think it’s important we know what we’re working with from a data-driven basis.”
In 2014, McCaskill asked the Government Accountability Office to look at these agreements, and the agency confirmed some of her concerns when they discovered the Postal Service wasn’t accounting for key cost-drivers such as package size and weight when making agreements, and wasn’t collecting some of the revenue it was owed from the deals.
McCaskill, a longtime advocate for postal service in rural communities, is widely credited with having waged a successful campaign over several years to save rural post offices and maintain delivery times when faced with closures and the slowing of standards.
McCaskill recently backed the Rural Postal Act, a bill that aims to improve postal service, delivery times, and standards in rural communities that have been disproportionately affected by cuts to the Postal Service. The bill—sponsored by Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and also cosponsored by Jon Tester of Montana—would restore overnight delivery, return a faster First-Class mail standard, make six-day delivery permanent, and enact strict criteria the Postal Service would have to meet before closing a post office to ensure that rural communities are still able to easily access the mail system.
Last year McCaskill requested an examination of the interaction between the lack of adequate access to broadband technology in rural areas and the reliability of Postal Service delivery. Without efficient and effective mail service as a result of recent Postal Service consolidations, rural Missourians are put at an economic and communications disadvantage, the effects of which haven’t yet been properly studied. McCaskill also recently signed on to a request for the federal government’s top watchdog to review the Postal Service’s calculation of delivery times and standards, and she helped win a one-year moratorium on postal closings until the impact of those closings is fully understood.
There isn’t a person in the upper reaches of the PO who
can say how much money it costs the PO per piece of
“last mile mail” because no one knows. There could be
100 commissions and the tools and thugs still couldn’t
figure it out due to the incompetence of these so called
“experts” who are running this great American service
into the ground
It looks more like the monkeys running the circus are the problem with spending $$$ and and giving bad service deals to itself rather than the actual working crafts
Senator McCaskill do not stop the Postal Circus corruption……….FDX $168 and UPS $104…………I am long both stocks.
When UPS went on strike one time, USPS could have improved the image of the “service” by accepting more than 4 packages per customer, thus nabbing the Parcel business!
UPS and FedEx say “really USPS you will only charge us that much to deliver our parcels, wow we can charge twice as much and make money on a parcel we pay you to deliver”
Senator, it’s called “bribes”. There is a little known board, not the BOG, that gives “advice” to the USPS management on how the business should be run, according to the entities on that board.
Guess who has two seats on that board: FedEx and UPS!!! We let them tell us how to do our business, give discount rates in exchange for bribes, and are all but handing them the keys to the office.
You as a Senator really need to look into the misappropriations and other malfeasance that happens with upper level management every day. Safety violations, methane leaks in a Detroit area office that was built over a brown field, a place where toxic waste was buried, and now has contaminated the office, resulting in the deaths of five people in just a year and a half from that office. Management knew the sensors that were supposed to detect the presence of dangerous gas emissions weren’t working but didn’t record it or report it.
We need the USPS, not just for my job and soon to be retirement, but it needs to be run as a true service, with carriers paid fair wages and management severely critiqued to try to stop the flood of incompetence, law breaking and safety violations. It is on a criminal scale, believe me, and something must be done.
The ones benefiting most from these “last mile of delivery” deals are UPS, FED EX, and the other USPS competitors. By paying a very small fee, the Post Office delivers for them, saving the competitor labor time and mileage on their vehicles. The USPS does not make enough on these packages to warrant the handling of them. Another consideration that I have spoken of is that there is no way of telling what the contents of such packages are. The USPS has strict limits on Hazardous materials, whereas the other carriers are more lax on what they accept, and whatever they accept, the Post Office then has to deliver. No one in management seems to get that fact when I present it to them.
Why also is the USPS not charging more for presorted and Standard mail, when today’s automation completely eliminates the need for any presorting? Giving discounts of up to 10 cents per letter is crazy, as this mail can be worked in house for less money, and i thought this was supposed to be worked in house when this was the case? In our plant, and probably most plants, presorted mail, which has been given the discount for being ready to ship, is dumped in with unprocessed First Class mail, thus eliminating the reason the mail was given a discount, and giving this mail preferred treatment for no reason other than to increase the mail count. Eliminate all presorted mail, the discounts given, and especially the totally insane Value Added Rebate given to the “big mailers”.