USPS Office of Inspector General

Sale is not a word usually associated with the Postal Service, but there is a first time for everything. Mail volume has dropped significantly this year, and the Postal Service is proposing a “Summer Sale” to encourage mailers to send more Standard Mail. The Postal Service believes it can use its excess capacity to deliver the additional mail volume at a relatively low cost.

Do you know why some magazines include postcards in the middle? Or have you mailed a letter back to a company in their envelope without having to put a stamp on it? Did you ever wonder how this service works?

While 2008 was not a good year for mail volume in general, one source of optimism for the future is the continued growth in mail tied to spending on political campaigns. This is spending during political campaigns on direct mail to promote candidates or issues and to raise funds. Fundraising requests can also generate single-piece First-Class Mail responses.

Imagine an economic collapse in which millions of people lose half of their life savings and their trust in the country’s largest financial institutions is severely shaken. To help restore trust in the financial sector, the government creates a savings system operated by its postal administration. Sound unrealistic? Maybe so, until you remember that the U.S. Post Office Department offered a government-backed savings system to Americans for more than half the twentieth century.

Career employees earn 4 hours of sick leave for a full pay period (80 hours), or at a rate of 5 percent. Some career employees are currently taking sick leave at approximately the same rate, liquidating their leave bank. The Postal Service’s sick leave absence rate (absenteeism) was 4.3 percent in 2008. This seems high compared to the 1.1 percent rate the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports for employees in the private sector and 1.7 percent rate for employees in the federal sector. So why was the Postal Service’s rate higher?