Industry Leader Urges Catalogers to Go to Washington
2007 was the year the catalog nearly faced extinction. The newly passed Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act was not yet in force, and the Postal Service used its old powers to levy a crippling price increase on catalog mailers. Within three years some 7,000 catalogs ceased publication and mail volume took a nose-dive from 25 billion pieces a year to under 4 billion. The reason: Catalogers had little to no juice on Capitol Hill.
At yesterday's annual forum of the American Catalog Mailers Association, which was born out of that troubling time, its chairman cautioned catalogers not to be lulled back to sleep and surrender the foothold they've secured on the Hill. “We face a [postal] board of governors inclined to capitulate to increases across all classes of mail. With the Marketplace Fairness Act, we're outgunned and outfunded by Amazon and Walmart,” GiftTree.com president Martin McClannan (below) told the group. “Look for causes and opportunities to get involved. The industry was asleep in 2007, and it's incumbent upon us to remain awake, remain vigilant, and the easiest way to do that is to have some engagement [with legislators].”