ABM Losing Hope for Saving Saturday Mail Delivery

Association prez says Congress interest is 'waning.'

By Bill Mickey
07/31/2009 -03:29 PM

B-to-B publishing association American Business Media today released a video statement that warns the USPS may win its plea for the elimination of Saturday delivery.

Without going so far to say that it's actually happening, ABM president and CEO Gordon Hughes nevertheless takes a glass-half-empy position on the matter.

Eliminating Saturday delivery would take an act of Congress. Hughes notes that Congress has long opposed a 5-day delivery week, and has historically enacted legislation to make sure it continues. "Well, it appears this is waning," Hughes says in the video, "and its inevitability is reluctantly being received."

Hughes doesn't say why he thinks the issue is reaching inevitibility or what happens next, or when, if at all, Saturday will be eliminated from the delivery cycle. But he says that ABM has joined a coalition of mailers and other associations to argue the mailers' position to Congress and the administration.

In the meantime, the USPS is hemorrhaging cash to the tune of $6.5 billion for fiscal year 2009, if $5.9 billion in cost savings are realized. In his statement to the House Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service, and the District of Columbia in March, PRC chairman Dan Blair said eliminating Saturday delivery, which the USPS sought in February, could save a "potential" $1.9 billion annually.

Bill Mickey is executive editor of Audience Development magazine.