Dear Member & Non-Member:

In his October 5th op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Junking the Junk Mail Office,” former UPS director Gary MacDougal calls for privatizing the US Postal Service. The piece’s subhead reads: “Email and Fedex already take care of serious delivery business. Why subsidize catalogue carriers?”

Mr. MacDougal goes on to these and other fallacious claims: “Online shopping catalogs and package-delivery competition from UPS and Fedex have further contributed to the Postal Service's woes” and “artificially low prices in non-monopoly areas — such as bulk-mail discounts that result in a glut of unwanted catalogues and credit-card offers in our mailboxes — have led to billions of dollars in losses.”

Essentially, he wants you to believe that the unwanted catalog is responsible for the huge postal deficit.

In the October 11 print edition, the WSJ published responses from me and others. The very limited word count required did not allow me to address all the inaccuracies and fallacies of the piece but I did offer this: “Commercial mail, including catalogs, has not generated billions in losses, as Mr. MacDougal suggests.

We estimate the catalog industry paid $3.6 billion in postage, covering more than $1 billion in the costs of running the Postal Service. Catalog mail is neither subsidized nor unwanted. In fact, half of America buys from catalogs. The shared ride from national warehouse directly into the home is eco-friendly, consuming fewer incremental gallons of gas than alternative shopping modes.”

That wasn't all. On October 6th, WSJ reporter Jennifer Levitz ran a piece on page B1, below the fold, titled: “Post Office’s Rescue Plan: Junk Mail,” where she starts off with the sentence, “Many consumers are irked by the catalogs, credit-card pitches and other ‘junk mail’ they receive.”

She continues that the USPS says it makes money on advertising mail and contributing to the $8.5 billion loss (it really is closer to $10 billion this year) is the $1.7 billion lost on “products that didn’t cover costs, including advertising-mail flat packages — typically catalogs…according to the Postal Regulatory Commission.”

The bulk of the article describes the postal reorganization plan and is mostly accurate. Because we had just submitted a letter to the editor on the previous day’s hatchet job, we elected not to submit again for fear it would degrade our chances of getting published to the more troubling piece.

We are fighting the conclusion that catalogs are unprofitable for the USPS in the US Court of Appeals. We feel we have raised some very valid issues that the postal regulator has not addressed. We have also questioned whether the accounting is correct and why the reported flat mail costs continue to rise at such a rapid rate despite the billions invested in automation.

Now we are finding ourselves defending cataloging in the court of public opinion. At the same time, some well-intentioned but misguided politicians are trying to bake catalog postage increases into legislation they are crafting.

The catalog industry is getting hit from multiple sides. With the Postal Service continuing to fight for its financial future, one can anticipate additional PR challenges. We now have several concerns: that we will get priced out of the mail or that consumers will come to view us as unwelcome.

ACMA resources are not adequate for this multi-front war. We need you to equip us to do battle on your behalf and to hire the experts we need on our team. For want of a fraction on what catalogers spend on postage, ACMA is in a position to save your costs and revenues, but with only 2% of the industry participating, our effectiveness is less than it could be. We really need you today. Please call Paul Miller (914-669-8391, pmiller@catalogmailers.org) or me (401-529-8183, hdavison@catalogmailers.org) to discuss how we get your company involved in this effort. There is a lot to lose. Help us win!