Will Postal Service Parcel Rate-Hikes Cause A Shipper Rethink? zerohedge.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from zerohedge.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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The U.S. Postal Service has emerged, bloodied and more than a bit bowed, from the most difficult year in its long history. But beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, the presidential election and the tussles with former President Donald Trump lies an existential crisis for the Postal Service: how to remain viable when most of the macro-trend winds are blowing in its face.
First-class and marketing mail, the traditional cores of the Postal Service, continued their secular declines in 2020, a downward trajectory accelerated by the pandemic. The shipping and package business is currently the lone bright spot, and to capitalize on its growth and offset the costs of processing and delivering parcels, the Postal Service implemented a series of rate increases on shipper-centric products. The increases, which took effect Jan. 24, will reduce, through not eliminate, the Postal Service s low-price proposition that e-merchants depend on to offer low- or no-cost shipping to end customers.
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There are many chapters that could fill the book of what is becoming a most remarkable American business story. Yet a chapter that some might skim over is the one describing how Jeff Bezos came to transportation and logistics and may end up dominating it from behind.
The trailblazers before him Leland Stanford, whose money built the transcontinental railroad; Jim Casey, whose United Parcel Service created the package delivery business as we ve come to know it; Malcom McLean, whose containerization model revolutionized international trade and transport; and Fred Smith, who took a traditional hub-and-spoke model, applied it to the urgent air shipping of high-value cargo and named it Federal Express all put transportation front and center.