Ep 170: Letters and parcels pricing

Sep 16, 2019

Marek Różycki (Last Mile Experts) discusses carrier-specific and carrier-agnostic parcel lockers:

• What this means in terms of parcel volumes in the network
• Cost of setting up the network

Then Mark Fallon, CEO and President of the Berkshire Company, joins me to discuss letter pricing in the age of parcels:

• Australia Post’s application to increase the basic postage rate
• The forces driving costs in the letter delivery network
• Pricing for reserved/monopoly products vs parcels
• Limits on US Postal Service letter price increases
• Allegations of cross-subsidy between parcels and letters
• Postal pricing oversight by the Postal Regulatory Commission
• Annual parcel price increases for USPS and its major competitors
• A second rate increase in a calendar year?
• Strategies to cope with falling letter volumes:
  • Reducing delivery days
  • Slowing letter delivery speed
  • Combining letter and parcel delivery
  • Changing the delivery fleet
  • Community mail boxes
• Reliability of the letters service