“Time is precious, but truth is more precious than
time.” These were the words of wisdom that I actually received
from inside a fortune cookie I opened, after an
especially satisfying Chinese meal.
Today as I sit here putting my efforts into expressing a deep injustice
I feel being committed against every mailing professional in the United
States, these words reverberate over and over in my mind and remind me of why
I am writing this article, instead of using the precious time to nurture my
own direct marketing business.
After fifteen years of serving on the Postal Customer
Council (PCC), and over seventeen years of dealing with the United States Post
Office in a commercial capacity, I‘ve experienced many frustrations over the
awareness that they are not just any supplier, because - let’s face it –
they are the ONLY supplier when a company needs to send mass amounts of
discounted domestic or Canadian letter mail.
Like many of us in the mailing industry, I’ve learned to stay in the
shadows, accepting the rules and regulations handed down from postal
headquarters, aware that if I made too much of a stink about things, it could
get even uglier when I presented my client’s mailings for acceptance.
The other day when I arrived about ten minutes late to
our monthly Postal Customer Council meeting, I noticed as I walked through the
meeting door that the lights were out. There was a power point presentation
being viewed. As I looked
around for some indication of what the program was about, and finally asked
what we were viewing, the chairman, a political mailing specialist, made the
comment, “You don’t want to know.”
Immediately I felt the hair on my arms rise as I realized that this was
going to be another infuriating postal experience.
Like most months, prior to leaving for the meeting, I
deliberated over whether I wanted to attend the monthly PCC meeting – mostly
because my time always seemed better spent elsewhere. Most months I convinced myself that it was in my company’s
best interest to stay on the board and act as the mailing chairperson, because
it kept me in the loop about postal issues and gave me direct knowledge of the
appropriate USPS personnel to
turn to when I needed assistance.
In the last few years I’ve mellowed a bit.
I know that people in bulk mail acceptance, and my fellow board
members, may still think of me as a high strung and outspoken small business
owner. But age and humility have encouraged me to perceive my role in the
universe a lot less egoistically. Living
and working in the Florida county where the anthrax tragedy occurred, also
brought me to the realization that the local postal personnel were not the
originators of most of the policies that they were paid to enforce. Many of
the illogical edicts that sometimes made doing direct mail a living hell -
were handed down from postal headquarters.
I remember when a postal clerk told me that during the anthrax attacks,
any personnel visible to the public, was not allowed to wear masks and gloves
because it would scare the customers; that was a day when I thanked my lucky
stars that I was not subjected to authorities that had such blatant disregard
for their employees’ personal well being. That sense of relief was short
lived.
As I continued to view the power point presentation, and
tried to figure out, on my own, what the subject matter was, the USPS Customer
Service Representative cheerfully explained that we were being asked to
present this direct mail promotional campaign at our next PCC function.
Immediately I knew that this was somehow related to the heavily promoted
NetPost program that encourage mailers to go online and do all their mailings
via the internet, using select national merchants referred by the USPS.
For the last couple of years I have been helping my local
PCC Executive Board stay one step
ahead of allowing the District USPS Marketing
Representative promote the NetPost on a mass level to the mailers in our
county. But now it looked like
the five or so companies that represented themselves on the power point
presentation as “All the Authorized Direct Mail Merchants” were light
years ahead of us. I guessed who
was responsible for the elaborate presentation and knew that these five
national companies, which consisted of the following: Data Dialog Marketing,
Direct Mail Quotes, InfoUSA, Zairmail and ZIPM, all now felt confident that
the USPS was under such dire financial pressure from the economic downtrend,
along with the availability of less costly advertising medium alternatives,
such as, fax broadcasting, the Internet and email, that they correctly assumed
that their sponsor, The United States Postal Service, would
brazenly ignore the fact - that
as a government organization, it was at the least, unethical, if not otherwise
unlawful, for the USPS to promote
individual companies.
Truth be told, I’m tired and a part of me is screaming
inside – “Give it up, you can’t fight City Hall.”
But I guess the same stupidity and willfulness that has kept me as an
unpaid promoter of the USPS and its services, convinces me that somebody has
to stand up and ask – “Hey, am I the only one who thinks this is a just
plain wrong?”
I truly admire the audacity and marketing savvy of the
five national companies that convinced a government organization to implement
this absolutely unfair and damaging business practice. While private companies
may certainly utilize aggressive business practices, it is unfair when the
USPS, by endorsing such business practices, cause thousands of other companies
in the mailing industry financial damage.
As for the USPS, I want answers for myself, and for all
the other people who work in the tens of thousands of mail houses and printing
companies throughout the United States and Canada.
We don’t make a commission on postage; yet every day thousands of us
spend our energy and time promoting the US mail as the best and least
intrusive promotional vehicle available. Let me know – am I missing
something here, or as the late - great comedian Rodney Dangerfield would ask
– “Hey where’s the respect?”