U.S. Postal Service Wants To Deliver More Groceries

The U.S. Postal Service wants to expand and extend its test of same-day grocery deliveries but isn't ready yet to take the venture nationwide.

The agency asked the Postal Regulatory Commission on Friday to extend the two-year test for another year, to October 31, 2017, and for permission to enter new markets. The venture serves select ZIP codes in the New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, Stamford (CT), and Las Vegas areas -- mostly in partnership with Amazon's "AmazonFresh" service.

"The Postal Service has determined that it will be necessary to continue the market test in a variety of metropolitan areas over the next year, in order for the Postal Service to make a final determination on the operational feasibility and the desirability of making Customized Delivery a permanent product," the filing said.

The USPS didn't state which new markets it would enter. The test is currently limited to annual revenues of less than $10 million, a restriction the USPS previously asked the PRC to waive. Actual profit and volumes from the program are not available to the public because of competitive issues.

The initial model involved non-career City Carriers Assistants delivering totes with groceries and other packaged goods to residences between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. But postal officials have indicated they want to test additional delivery windows, as well as a variety of pricing structures.

The test is part of the Postal Service's multi-pronged effort to grow its package-delivery business to make up for declining volumes of traditional mail. That brings us to today's Publishing Word of the Day: Dead Tree Edition hereby renames the USPS the U.S. Parcel Service because of its focus single-minded focus on parcel delivery, to the detriment of traditional mail

If you're wondering what this has to do with publishing, you haven't been in a meeting with postal officials lately to discuss Periodicals service and pricing when all they want to talk about is their growing package business. The official USPS position is that it can't live on parcels alone, but try telling that to postal execs who sound so adversarial when it comes to the boring old letters and flats mail that still brings in most of the bucks.

Related articles:

• Third Bush on the Right, Please: USPS Grocery Deliveries Would Need Lots of TLC from Carriers (Editor's note: "Third Bush on the Right, Please" refers to a Customized Delivery customer's hypothetical delivery instructions, not to Jeb Bush. We apologize for the confusion this headline has caused.) 
• USPS Grocery Delivery Coming to the Big Apple
• Dead Tree Edition is celebrating July with the 31-part Publishing Word of the Day series, which includes the USPS's apparently creative use of the word "inadvertent."

 

Publishing's Virtual Reality Check

Virtual Reality: The imagined world in which a sophisticated journalism enterprise can be funded entirely by banner ads.

The latest twist on this irrational utopianism was the hope that distributing content and ads via Facebook would, in the words of MediaPost columnist Bob Garfield, "be the magic beans to grow a magic beanstalk to plunder the goose that lays the golden eggs."

Added Garfield: "Magic would be most useful at the moment, after all, due to reality totally sucking."

It turns out that in non-Virtual Reality -- often called, simply, Reality -- Facebook is going to do what's best for Facebook and not what's best for publishers or journalism or the public good.

Those who believe in Virtual Reality still insist that we can get banner ads to pay the bills if we can just generate enough page views. But publishers who try to do that end up on the Hamster Wheel of Death. The Reality is that Mobilegeddon (readers' shift from PCs to smartphones) is reducing page views per visitor and the glut of web content is shrinking revenue per view.

As The Guardian's Katharine Viner stated in a speech this week, "Innovative journalism needs a new business model."


This is the eighth in Dead Tree Edition's 31-part Publishing Word of the Day series, where we delve into the words that explain what's really happening in contemporary publishing.

The Mad Men Discover Diversity

It’s come to our attention here at the Dead Tree Edition Research Institute that our friends in the advertising industry are suddenly talking about diversity.

This belated interest seems odd for those of us in the publishing business, where we’ve been flagellating ourselves for eons over our hiring practices and (increasingly permeable) glass ceilings.

The diversity talk in Adland is being prompted by recent scandals involving top execs making racist comments, displaying misogynistic behavior, and engaging in unwanted groping of employees. No news here: The ad agencies have been groping us publishers for decades.

But understand that “diversity,” our Publishing Word of the Day, has a unique meaning in the ad industry – where, after all, words are subject to novel interpretations.

In the World of Mad Men, diversity is when executives at the top holding companies – white, male executives – talk about the need to hire more women into the advertising industry. But not just any women, as an anonymous ad exec explained to me:

“We’re looking especially for young women. Of legal age, of course, but barely. Extra points for wearing short, tight skirts that are properly filled out, if you know what I mean. And, for God’s sake, none of those feminazis who go running to HR or a private attorney whenever the guys in the office want to have a little fun.”


Other seemingly familiar words that have received the Dead Tree Edition Publishing Word of the Day treatment this month include gravitas, long-form journalism, and master baiters.Tomorrow's word: Virtual Reality

Just What We Need: Another Euphemistic Management Tactic

De-Nial is infested with crocodiles.

Looking for a way to pare down your company without having to fend off negative publicity?

From the folks who brought us “pursuing other opportunities” as a euphemism for “got canned” comes the art denialsizing.

Dr. Joe Webb, a noted printing-industry economist who discovered this Publishing Word of the Day, defines denialsizing as “saying that everything is okay with your company despite you laying off scads of employees.”

The tactic is not unique to the publishing industry, but we’ve had more than our share of denialsizing. First came the announcements of new digital initiatives carefully timed to paper over layoffs on the print side of the business.

"Pursuing new opportunities"

More recently, with CPMs for web ads continuing to plummet, some of the digital folks have been caught up in the reorganizations, strategy shifts, pivoting, and Six-Sigmaing while management spins plausible denialsizabilities to the trade press and Wall Street.

Remember, kids, De-Nial is a dangerous place. Hang around too long there and something's likely to bite you in your hind quarters.

The Dead Tree Edition Research Institute and Tiddlywinks Club is celebrating July with Publishing Word of the Day, an exploration of terms that will help you make sense of the nonsensical world of contemporary publishing.