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MANY DIRECT MARKETERS ARE still in shock after seeing the U.S. Postal Service's proposed rates for standard mail parcels weighing less than a pound. If approved, they'll result in increases as high as 99.6%! Yes, the USPS has said it might consider deeper drop-ship discounts, but those incentives would come nowhere near what'd be needed to offset such huge hikes.

For sure, not every standard mail parcel shipper will be facing 99% increases, but many fall very uncomfortably between 30% and 40%. I don't know how the USPS or the Postal Rate Commission defines “rate shock,” but there's no doubt in my mind that a proposal which is more than 10 times the rate of inflation since rates last rose most definitely would induce that condition. In fact, for some of these shippers, the cost of the increase alone would consume some of their annual profit.

People are asking what in blazes the postal service was thinking when it put this case together. They want to know if the USPS did any research at all to determine its impact on businesses built around the use of standard mail. They also want to know how prices this high could be presented just one short year after the last increase. Even more so, mailers ask, if the postal service was aware its standard mail parcel expenses were rising so phenomenally, why wasn't something done long before now to contain the costs of processing and delivery rather than just dumping the bill for its inefficiency on customers?

These are some of the issues that will be in play as R2006 is heard by the PRC. But just airing these matters won't be good enough. Customers need to find out exactly what the PRC and the Board of Governors plan to do to make sure no one gets put out of business because the postal gnomes weren't minding the store.

When things like this happen, you wonder if the USPS has any understanding at all about its customers' businesses. You also wonder how it could doubt the call for a vigilant regulator under reform when it's clear that without one, some businesses simply would be kaput.

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GENE A. DEL POLITO is president of the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) in Arlington, VA.