Word: postally
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...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...
...sheer size of such facilities dwarfs the capabilities of private competitors and makes it tempting to take these rivals lightly. Postal managers boast that the U.S. system delivers as much mail daily as FedEx handles in a year. "We are at the extremes in everything," says New York Postmaster Sylvester Black. "We talk about the evolution of the mail, but the overwhelming majority of people get their bills by mail, pay their bills by mail and get their magazine subscriptions by mail. The old standby is still the old standby...