The Postal Service has introduced a First-Class Mail Global Forever Stamp. The new stamp will allow customers to mail letters anywhere in the world for one set price of $1.10, and is among new mailing and shipping services filed with the Postal Regulatory Commission. The price for First-Class Mail single-piece letters will increase by a penny as of January 27, 2013. The new 46 cent Forever stamps allows customers to mail letters to any location in the United States. Forever stamps are always good for mailing a one-ounce letter anytime in the future regardless of price changes.
Highlights of the new single-piece First-Class Mail pricing, effective Jan. 27, 2013 include:
Letters (1oz.) — 1-cent increase to 46 cents
Letters additional ounces — unchanged at 20 cents
Letters to all international destinations (1oz.) — $1.10
Postcards — 1-cent increase to 33 cents
Several new Shipping Services products are now available as well. Free tracking will be offered to all competitive packages, including retail Priority Mail and Parcel Post (recently renamed Standard Post). Also new, customers shipping Critical Mail letters and flats will now have the option of receiving a signature upon delivery as part of the service offering. A large variety of flat-rate boxes and envelopes for Express Mail and Priority Mail, including the padded and legal-sized flat rate envelopes will continue to be offered by the Postal Service.
New domestic retail pricing for Priority Mail Flat Rate products include: Small box — $5.80; Medium box — $12.35; Large box — $16.85; Large APO/FPO box — $14.85; Regular envelope — $5.60; Legal envelope — $5.75 Padded envelope — $5.95.
The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. Since 2006, the Postal Service has reduced its annual cost base by approximately $15 billion and reduced the size of its career workforce by 168,000 or 24 percent. During these unprecedented cost cutting initiatives, the Postal Service continued to deliver record levels of service to its customers.
Despite achieving record growth in its package business and stabilization of other revenues, the Postal Service continues to operate with an inflexible business model that hinders its ability to be self-sufficient. In Fiscal Year 2012, the Postal Service was forced to default on $11.1 billion in mandated payments to the U.S. Treasury, which contributed to a recorded loss of $15.9 billion.
The Postal Service continues to seek legislation to provide it with greater flexibility to control costs and generate new revenue, and encourages the 113th Congress to make postal reform legislation an urgent priority.
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A self-supporting government enterprise, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation — 151 million residences, businesses and Post Office™ Boxes. The Postal Service™ receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. With 32,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, usps.com®, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $65 billion and delivers nearly 40 percent of the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 35th in the 2011 Fortune 500. In 2011, Oxford Strategic Consulting ranked the U.S. Postal Service number one in overall service performance of the posts in the top 20 wealthiest nations in the world. Black Enterprise and Hispanic Business magazines ranked the Postal Service as a leader in workforce diversity. The Postal Service has been named the Most Trusted Government Agency for six years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute.
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