USPS Working Out Details for Winter Sale
The likelihood that the incentive will be approved is at 75 percent, according to ACMA executive director.
A “Winter Sale” for standard mailers, similar to the Summer Sale incentive that was implemented earlier this year, is beginning to take shape, according to a letter recently sent to members of the American Catalog Mailers Association.
Executive Director Hamilton Davison wrote that this latest incentive would have similar features to the Summer Sale, but also “notable differences.”
Davison stresses that nothing has been finalized by the USPS Board of Governors nor officially submitted to the PRC, but based on a variety of discussions that the ACMA has had with those “close to the situation” in Washington, the Winter Sale will offer the top 3,500 mailers—up from the 3,000 qualifying for the Summer Sale— an incentive to increase their mail volume from January to March 2010.
The incremental volume will receive a 20-30 percent discount on mail volume over that sent in the same period last year. In other words, any volume increase over what was mailed from the January 1 to March 31, 2009 time frame would qualify for the incentive rebate for the same period the following year. “The argument for a lower than 30 percent discount is that mail volumes are higher in January to March than they are in the summer,” Davison wrote.
Unlike the current incentive, however, there won’t be a comparative period to establish a trend line.
The USPS will “bookend” mail volume to prevent load shifting from December 2009, or April 2010, by requiring mailers to mail the same amount (or more) in these two months that they did in the same months of the prior year or face an adjustment to the rebate amount as is being made in the current program.
Davison added that further meetings regarding the Winter Sale between the ACMA and PRC staffers are currently being scheduled. “At this point, I would handicap the likelihood of a Winter Sale at 75 percent,” he wrote.
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