While I know some of these publications serve a "community purpose" for news, the fee would help our financial crisis.
What do you think? Good idea? How much should we charge?
Drop me a note here.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Thinking outside boxes
One reader writes and suggests that the Postal Service take advantage of it's prime location by charging rental for news and information displays. For a small, modest fee, most would be willing to pay.
While I know some of these publications serve a "community purpose" for news, the fee would help our financial crisis.
What do you think? Good idea? How much should we charge?
Drop me a note here.
While I know some of these publications serve a "community purpose" for news, the fee would help our financial crisis.
What do you think? Good idea? How much should we charge?
Drop me a note here.
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10 comments:
Super idea!
Maybe in a larger office but not in small offices. Its the only place people can go and read the bulletin boards, some small towns don't even have a weekly newspaper.
It is good to be looking for ways to improve our financial situation, but this one could be a bit much. In small towns, when we post information for the small volunteer-ran library, it IS a community service. If we started charging, we would probably lose their business and cause ill will. How about having a bulletin board to post personal things and charge for that? For example, yard sales, lost pets, available jobs, etc.
I think this is a great idea. Post Offices often have many of these boxes in front of their buildings because it's a convenient location for the vendors and customers. I even have one in the tiny town I work at. Maybe a fee that would be about 10% of the sales from the machines would be reasonable. And if some vendors don't want to pay it may prevent the cluttered appearance in front of the post offices.
In general, comercializing the Post Office is a bad idea. However, we could probably rent space on delivery vehicles - even the large trucks that trasport mail between processing centers.
I think it is a great idea. I agree that we shouldn't do it for community services but for private advertisements is good. Also advertising on the trucks is a great idea.
For the relatively small amount this would bring in I think it is a poor idea. This is a service that we provide our customers at no cost to us. I have seen businesses that charged for the space lose the vendors that provided the papers. This is not good business sense for either the vendor or the USPS.
The time has come to look at every possible avenue to generate revuenue. We should have been advertising on mail truck for years, especially the semi trucks. Yes we contract those out, but we could work out something with those contractors to make a additional buck.
In a large city, there is quite a variety of papers - and when they are on "postal property", customers think we endorse them. My office has had major problems from diverse groups who had their boxes vandalized - and want to hold the USPS responsible. We ended up saying NO to any boxes on our property in our district.
I understood this is in our laws to not allow on Postal property anywhere anytime.
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