Costco Wholesale Corporation Reports September Sales Results

FY2022 fourth quarter service performance scores covering July 1 through Aug. 12 included: *First-Class Mail: 93.0 percent of First-Class Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, consistent with performance from the fiscal third quarter. *Marketing Mail: 94.3 percent of Marketing Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, consistent with performance from the fiscal third quarter. *Periodicals: 86.5 percent of Periodicals delivered on time against the USPS service standard, consistent with performance from the fiscal third quarter.

"The Postal Reform Act of 2018: Improving Postal Operations, Service, and Transparency" was introduced in the U.S. Senate yesterday as a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Senators Tom Carper (D-Del.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). If passed, the legislation would make sweeping changes to current rules and regulations that have led, in large part, to the dire long-term financial situation of the U.S. Postal Service, including 11 straight years of net losses and a net loss for its first quarter totaling $540 million - despite the USPS setting a record on Dec. 18, 2017, when more than 37 million packages were delivered, the most packages delivered in a single day in its more than 200-year history.

Consumer complaints to Keep Me Posted (KMP) increased throughout the pandemic as service providers altered or removed paper communication preferences at an alarming rate. For years, banks, utilities, telecoms and other companies have encouraged and even incentivized their customers to voluntarily opt in to digital correspondence on their accounts. Over time however, many service providers have replaced carrots with sticks and charge punishing fees for paper bills and statements. Since the beginning of the pandemic, a laundry list of major corporations have taken advantage of widespread disruptions to proactively assault longstanding communications preferences. Far too many stopped asking consumers to opt in to electronic bills, statements and other important notices, and instead just switched their account holders from paper to digital communication without prior consent. These anti-consumer practices show no sign of fixing themselves, but there is a silver lining. In many instances, consumers can reclaim their preferences for paper communications, free of charge, by taking a few proven steps.