The following is a perspective by postal commentator Gene Del Polito prepared for publication in Direct magazine. The views expressed are the author's and do not necessarily constitute the official views of AMMA.
This Christmas more people made gift purchases over the Internet than ever before. The rush to buy on-line before the Christmas holiday subsequently brought package deliverers record volumes of new business. According to Zona Research, the number one beneficiary of this largess was United Parcel Service (UPS), who captured 55% of the online package delivery market, followed by Federal Express (Fedex) with 32%, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) with a much more modest 10%. That's right. UPS delivered five times as many online initiated packages and Fedex three times as many as the USPS.
Judging, however, by UPS' weeping and gnashing of teeth over House postal subcommittee chairman John McHugh's Postal Modernization Act, legislation that has the very modest goal of ensuring the survival of a universal mail delivery system, you would think UPS and its brethren are losing enormous shares of the parcel delivery market to the USPS. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
What is true, though, is the lack of desire by any of the Postal Service's competitors to provide anything even resembling cost-efficient, universal, residential parcel delivery service. According to a recent report by MSNBC, a Fedex spokesman said his company "isn't...focused on the lower-value goods which aren't...time-definite." Airborne Express, MSNBC reported, "dumped several on-line and catalogue customers" because, as an Airborne spokesperson put it, the company has "been more selective about the business" it carries. And even though UPS affirms an interest in residential delivery, its pricing of residential services (particularly when compared to the USPS' Parcel Post service) clearly evidences a preference for the more lucrative business-to-business market. Mailers have long argued that if the Postal Service were to abandon totally its parcel delivery services, as UPS so ardently desires, residential parcel delivery prices would soar.
How is it that those who seem so intent on undermining the fiscal integrity of the U.S. Postal Service evidence absolutely no interest whatever in filling the universal delivery void that unquestionably would result from the USPS' demise? Perhaps this is an issue members of Congress should be asking UPS and Fedex lobbyists as they walk the halls of Capitol Hill trying to peddle their own brand of legislative snake oil.
UPS and its cohorts whine incessantly about the need for a level playing field. Rather than abandoning a universal delivery system to their whims and desires, maybe the best way to level the field is figuring how to require everyone within the postal services marketplace to pick up their fair share of the nation's universal delivery obligation.