Word: postally
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...group of Americans is still mad as hell at the Postal Service--its workers. The number of employee grievances awaiting arbitration rose 44% last year, a sign of mounting labor tension. The premium on efficiency has, according to the Washington Post, driven a few desperate workers in West Virginia to rig the independent audits of their on-time delivery. And in another burst of ghastly work-related violence, a Milwaukee, Wis., mail handler killed himself and a co-worker last month. Union leaders are becoming bellicose over what they call management's failure to share bonuses with workers. "The labor...
...Runyon, 73, who cut nearly 50,000 jobs after taking charge in 1993, the stakes in the battle to deliver mail in one form or another could hardly be higher. At issue, he says, is the survival of the Postal Service and its commitment to "universal service" for everyone from AT&T executives to Alaskan homesteaders. "We deliver to every house in America" six days a week, says the white-thatched veteran executive of Ford, Nissan USA and the Tennessee Valley Authority. "No competitor can touch that." None want to, in fact, because of the high costs of delivering...
Electronic delivery is already a huge threat. Faxes and E-mail have taken a $6 billion bite out of postal revenues in recent years. The damage could spread as software makers perfect electronic signatures that senders can use to authenticate their E-mail messages, thereby reducing the need for hard copies of such documents as wills and contracts. The post office is fighting back with some wizardry of its own in the form of an "electronic postmark"--a digital time stamp that, for a fee, can be used to certify that E-mail has been transmitted...
...Postal Service has a huge sideline business, its No. 2 money earner: selling information about you to marketers. The USPS compiles and sells the country's most complete demographic data on consumer tastes and interests. "We know who skis, who fly-fishes, who goes to the movies," says chief operating officer William Henderson. Such detailed information can serve as the basis for targeted advertising, as opposed to plain old junk mail. Henderson says this advertising is "the fastest-growing segment of first-class mail." Internet services can play the same game, of course, and have been compiling their own data...
Changes are on view at your now friendly post office, or should we say postal retail outlet. Some 700 of the system's 33,000 post offices have morphed from bank-vault blandness into boutiques that sell such items as hats, neckties and Bugs Bunny trinkets while still providing a full line of postal services. The truly postally obsessed can choose a Pony Express sweatshirt or infant gear emblazoned with the words JUST DELIVERED. And customers are buying. "When a store replaces a post office, there is more than a 10% increase in revenues," says Nancy Wood, a postal-marketing...