Postal Service benefits by delivering for Amazon

PHOTOGRAPHER: The Associated Press

A box bering Amazon's smile logo moves along a conveyor belt Monday, Nov. 30, 2015, at Amazon.com's fulfillment center in DuPont, Wash.

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I was out for my morning power-walk in the neighborhood when I heard the familiar sound of the mail truck. Odder than hearing it at that time of day — my street typically has afternoon delivery — was the day itself: Sunday.

As the truck went by, I understood why it was there: Boxes piled next to the driver sported Amazon’s familiar logo.

For more than a year, the U.S. Postal Service has been providing Sunday delivery to the retail behemoth in more and more communities. And with the National Retail Federation forecasting that almost half of all holiday browsing and buying will be done online this year, it’s easy to see why the mail truck was out early.

Indeed, the Postal Service predicted last month that on each of the four Sundays between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it will deliver an average 5 million packages — not all of them for Amazon, I suppose, but probably a good chunk. (A Postal Service spokeswoman declined to answer my questions about the Sunday Amazon work, calling it proprietary information.)

But the arrangement comes at a good time for both the agency and the company.

We’re using first-class mail less often these days, resulting in a 35 percent decline in volume in the past decade, according to postal officials. That represents a loss of some $17 billion in revenue, since first-class mail is so lucrative.

A promising growth area, though, is package shipping, which includes the Amazon work. It showed a 14.1 percent increase in volume in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

“We’re clearly benefitting from the overall growth in e-commerce,” U.S. Postmaster General Megan Brennan said on a media call last month to discuss fiscal 2015 financial results.

While revenue rose, the Postal Service still ended the year $5 billion in the hole, much of it due to health care and retirement expenses.

And Joseph Corbett, the agency’s chief financial officer, said that just replacing lost first-class volume with shipping “will only continue the downward pressure on our financialresults,” since the latter is a more labor-intensive business.

Still, looking to be more entrepreneurial, the Postal Service took on the “last mile” — Sunday delivery.

For Amazon, the contract offered a seventh day to get product swiftly to consumers. It also gave the company a longer leash on deliveries because shipping wasn’t handed off as soon.

To that end, Amazon has been setting up “sortation” centers around the country that take consumer purchases packaged at its warehouses, sort them by ZIP code and get them to local post offices for ultimate delivery by carriers.

The system is seen as a way to avoid a repeat of the 2013 holidays, when volume and bad weather conspired against getting packages under the tree by Christmas.

Because, as we all know, “Neither snow, nor rain …”

Marlene Kennedy is a freelance columnist. Opinions expressed in her column are her own and not necessarily the newspaper’s. Reach her at [email protected]