Cutting Hours or Cutting Post Offices

Sometime in the next few months the Postal Service will receive an advisory opinion from the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) on the potential closing of less than no more than 241 post offices, stations or branches. This is a far cry from the more than 3200 sites in its initial proposal that it presented to the PRC. Once the opinion is issued, the Postal Service will likely close most of th 241 sites now on the list.

Those communities that found their Post Office on the original list but are no longer under consideration for closing are likely relieved that their Post Office will remain open. These communities will be less pleased when the hours that the Post Office is open shrink as the Postal Service looks at ways to deal with declining demand for retail services.

The Postal Service has reduced operating hours at Post Offices across the U.S. for much of the past year. The Portland Press Herald recently reported on decisions affecting 52 offices in New England. Similar actions have taken place in Maryland, including my local post office in Silver Spring.

What the Postal Service is now doing is not much different than what public libraries, recreations centers, parks and other government service centers do when struck with declining budgets. When the agency cannot close a library do to community or political pressure, it finds it politically easier to cut hours of all libraries instead. Community pressure is less intense if the hours are cut by 10% instead of cutting 10% of facilities.

The impact of politics in this process does not necessarily improve service. While a community may like a library nearby, the library provides no service at hours when the community needs the service. For example, years ago, the City of Rochester had to choose between cutting library hours across the board or closing its least used facility and expanding hours at the closest nearby facility and maintaining extended evening and weekend hours at other libraries. A study of use of library services by patrons showed that customers would be best served by expanded hours. An examination of the addresses of patrons that used each branch showed that the branch to be closed was used by patrons that often used the neighboring branch as well. In the end, the least used facility was closed, and the expanded hours resulted in increased library use in the community that lost its neighborhood branch.

The Postal Service's actions show how its decisions, as influenced by regulatory, political, financial, and labor contract constraints, reflect the pre-eminence of the governmental characteristics of the organization. While the Postal Service does offer other ways to buy stamps and postage, its "retail strategy" appears to be no more than to shrink its business by reducing access at a rate most likely equal to the rate of retirement of postal clerks. The Postal Service appears to be managing more to the budget available to provide retail services rather than in following a coherent strategy to serve retail customers.

The Postal Service's strategy will likely drive business away, particularly among small businesses that will ship their overnight and two-day items via FedEx or UPS because their retail outlets are open an hour or more longer than Postal Service outlets. These customers will be paying FedEx and UPS's higher retail prices just because they have no other choice that day.

The Postal Service could follow actions that its domestic competitors and foreign postal operators have chosen and switch their retail presence from primarily corporate offices to primarily franchise offices. It could expand the use of automation and replace part of the line of retail windows with a line of automated postal centers like food and home retailers like Giant Foods, Stop and Shop, Kroger, Safeway and Home Depot have.

The Postal Service needs a real retail strategy with real revenue, capital and expense budgets that is focused on serving retail customers profitably. These budgets should reflect what is needed to successfully serve retail customers profitably, not just what can be done with existing capital resources and current employees. These budgets have to reflect the decline in retail letter mail, work to stem the decline in retail parcel traffic.

With a real retail strategy that retains widespread access to the network, the Postal Service could transition to a new retail approach without scaring communities that they will be abandoned. This transition will not be easy. Retail postal customers in Sweden where corporate Post Offices were all closed were resistant to the closure of their local corporate offices and often expected the worse. Surveys conducted since the switch to an all franchise operation show that customers are more satisfied with Sweden Post's retail services. In particular, the expansion in hours and shorter lines made Sweden Post's retail products more competitive with others offering retail parcel and express services.

The Courier, Express, and Postal Business and the Nobel Prize

The research that Oliver Williams completed that brought him the Nobel Prize in Economics highlight key issues in the transformation of the courier, express and postal (CEP) business over the past two decades. In its press release, the Nobel Committee stated that "Oliver Williamson has argued that markets and hierarchical organizations, such as firms, represent alternative governance structures which differ in their approaches to resolving conflicts of interest. The drawback of markets is that they often entail haggling and disagreement. The drawback of firms is that authority, which mitigates contention, can be abused. Competitive markets work relatively well because buyers and sellers can turn to other trading partners in case of dissent. But when market competition is limited, firms are better suited for conflict resolution than markets. A key prediction of Williamson's theory, which has also been supported empirically, is therefore that the propensity of economic agents to conduct their transactions inside the boundaries of a firm increases along with the relationship-specific features of their assets."

So what does that mean in plain English? More importantly, why am I writing about this award in a blog dedicated to the courier, express, and postal industry?

Simply, operators in this business have a choice as they try to provide service across a broad geographic area or across the range of transportation and communications needs of their customers within a firm rather than through contractual arrangements between regional or modal partners. With few exceptions, when faced with the choice of providing service with a partner through a contract or within the constructs of a corporate structure, operators in this business have chosen corporate structures. The expansions of Deutsche Post, FedEx, TNT, and United Parcel Service all followed this path.

These firms succeeded by out-competing national postal operators that had to offer international service through bi-lateral or multi-national contractual arrangements, many of which were negotiated through the Universal Postal Union. The key problem of these contractual arrangements were that the operator selling the international service could not truly tell the buyer how long it would take to get delivery because they could not control the end-to-end service. Nor could the originating operator offer a seamless track-and-trace service until many years after the global corporate operators had made them a requirement of international express and parcel delivery.

The choice of a corporate model reflects a choice on a less global scale as well. Efforts by La Poste (France) and Royal Mail to provide service throughout Europe illustrate attempts to create a corporate structure within the Europe for parcel delivery to replace the contractual service that involved each national postal operators. The Austrian Post has purchased a number of firms focused in Eastern Europe with a goal of creating a stronger regional delivery competitor. The recent decision to merge the post offices in Sweden and Denmark also illustrates the choice of a corporate rather than a contract model to provide service within the CEP markets that the two independent posts now operate. Finally, Purolator Courier, a Canada Post subsidiary, and Canada Post itself, have established a strong corporate presence to handle cross-border traffic. Purolator is using its presence in the cross-border market to begin a domestic United States service.

Now there are limits to the use of a corporate model in the CEP industry. Firms in the industry use both a corporate and contractual or franchise model to provide retail services. The cost of maintaining a stand-alone retail infrastructure that has different business challenges than the rest of the CEP business has driven many firms to switch from the corporate to the contract model for this part of the business.

The last area that may fall under the contract model is the pick-up and delivery services themselves. Here the question is whether it is better to manage the delivery process with employees or contractors. The local courier business has always used a contractor model reflecting the uncertainty of the traditional on-demand unscheduled delivery service that they offered. FedEx Ground has used that model since its founding as Roadway Package Express. The recent court cases, IRS rulings, and NLRB rulings illustrate the challenge of maintaining the delivery function as a contractual arrangement and still maintaining proper control over the delivery portion of the service. However, both FedEx and local couriers believe that the cost advantages of managing delivery with contract drivers rather than employees is worth creating the proper legal structures to both ensure a reasonable level of control while still maintaining the driver's contractor status.

The question of corporate vs. contract models will likely come up as Congress looks at potential business models for the Postal Service. The work of Oliver Williams suggests that use of contract model could work for the retail side of the business where a franchiser that does not live up to its end of the bargain could be replaced. His work also suggests that delivery contractors could work in those areas where control over the appearance and schedule of the deliverer was not an issue. This is precisely what the Postal Service does with box-route contractors that serve many rural areas.

More importantly, his work explains why breaking the Postal Service into regional franchises or separating the delivery from processing and collection processes make little sense. Once the separation occurred the various parts would still have to contract with each other to provide end-to-end service. There is no competitive market for large-scale sortation. The growth of UPS’s and FedEx’s use of Parcel Select suggests that the collection and sortation companies would still have to contract with a company running the existing delivery network. Mr. Williams research suggests that there would be significant coordination issues and contractual gamesmanship between the various parts of what is now a unified Postal Service. The experiences of Citi Mail in Sweden and TNT, DX and others in UK illustrate the preference of operators to offer end to end service and the coordination issues and contractual gamesmanship that exists in developing interline agreements when these firms have to contract with either a national postal operator or another independent operator. [One of the drivers behind mergers and territorial expansion of railroads and less-than-truckload trucking firms in the US was the failure of a regulated interline process to resolve contractual and service issues when one firm passedfreigt to the other]

Finally, his work suggests the mail business will see more consolidation and not less in the future. The current process in which multiple firms handle the process a taking a document from concept to delivery with each handoff handled via a contracted or regulated process, could soon involve fewer firms as the advantage of integrating more of these processes within a single firm becomes clear to firms on either ends of these processes merge.

Consolidation of the Package Delivery Market in Europe

The Sunday Telegraph reported today that UPS has made an informal offer of $15 billion (10 billion Euro) to purchase TNT suggests that we may be watching the beginning of a major consolidation of express and parcel carriers in Europe. The price discussed is around 25% more than TNT's share price in mid-July when the Financial Times reported that FedEx was interested in TNT. UPS's offer is not unexpected as some investment analysts suggested, at the time time of the report of both FedEx and UPS would be interested in TNT. At that time some analysts suggested that UPS would be in a stronger financial position to buy TNT and if a bidding war broke out. As UPS's reported bid amount is about equal to the value of TNT based on the stock's close on August 8, 2008, the reported bid does not represent a premium on TNT's current market valuation.

The Telegraph report provides significantly more detail than the earlier report on FedEx's interest in TNT. The report includes the names of the investment advisers for both TNT and UPS and indicates that A.T. Kearney has completed a study for UPS's adviser in the deal, Morgan Stanley. The report also indicates that TNT's mail operations would be sold, possibly to CVC, the European buyout firm that owns interests in both De Post-La Post and Post Danmark. (Post Danmark also has agreed to merge with Posten, the Swedish Post Office) It is unclear whether the price for the postal operations is included in the $15 billion cost of the deal. Given that some of the increase in TNT's price over its price in mid July when rumors of a possible takeover first surfaced reflect the decline in oil prices, it is possible that the value of a deal when consummated will be greater than $15 billion. Also, what is unclear is whether TNT's ground parcel business would convey to UPS or the purchaser of the postal business.


The purchase of TNT by UPS would have a significant impact on competition within Europe. Currently, the five largest express competitors are TNT (17%), DHL (16%), UPS (8%), La Poste (the French Post Office) 7%, and FedEx (6%). The remaining 46% of the market is divided the national post offices and regional operators. With the merger UPS would be the clear market leader with 25% of the intra-European market and would be in stronger position for traffic between Western Europe and the rest of the world than the remaining two other global competitors, DHL and FedEx. Most importantly, UPS would then be in a better position to fill up its growing capacity in China and the rest of Asia with express traffic going between China and Europe than carriers with a smaller market position in Europe. In addition, UPS's stronger position in Europe would give it the opportunity to take market share from DHL and FedEx in the trans-Atlantic market.

The sale of the postal operations makes sense given that mail is not part of UPS's core business.
The proposed sales of TNT's mail business raises questions about the long term financial viability of European national posts, and in particular the posts of smaller countries. A merger of the TNT mail operations with Posten (Sweden), La Post (Belgium), and Post Dankan (Denmark) creates an entity with greater heft when competing with the larger national posts in Germany, France, and Great Britain. If TNT's growing ground parcel business remains with the postal entitity then the merger would have created a significant European competitor in parcels with particular strengths in the Benelux and Nordic regions. Without TNT's European ground parcel business, it is not clear how much an outside investor would be willing to pay for just mail services.

The merger of TNT's mail services with that of the other posts could have some positive impact on service. It could result in improved coordination of cross-border mail service among the linked companies with the possibility of stronger service to Great Britain and other regions where TNT has established itself as a leader in the competitive mail business.

Finally, if this merger goes through, one would expect that other competitors in the European market to start looking at defensive moves to improve their business position. The easiest
linkage to imagine is one between FedEx and LaPoste, since they have had a business relationship since at least 2000, but less obvious mergers may occur with a focus of FedEx and/or La Poste working to strengthen their position on a country by country basis. On the mail and ground parcel side, one could see an interest in smaller posts in Eastern and central Europe exploring mergers and operating agreements. The logical leaders in this region are Deusche Post, Oesterreich Post, and Swiss Post.