The Scoop on Droop: Bad News for Mailers
This article originally appeared in the Dead Tree Edition blog on Saturday, Feb. 20.
The Postal Service released final "droop" regulations this week that give small newspapers a break but are otherwise full of problems for mailers of catalogs, magazines and other flat mail.
The rules, which are to be fully implemented Oct. 3, will be an especially hard blow to tabloid-sized publications and to skinny magazines, catalogs, and retail flyers. And they might prove to be a hindrance for co-mail operations – which postal officials have touted as an ideal way to reduce both mailers' and Postal Service costs.
The regulations will impose a significant penalty on mail that fails a new flats deflection test, commonly referred to as the droop test, which is supposed to determine whether mail is well suited to the Postal Service’s sortation equipment.
The Postal Service received comments from 35 associations, businesses, and people regarding the proposed regulations – and ignored almost all of them. One exception is that copies in carrier-route bundles delivered to a destination delivery unit (DDU) are exempted.
That change was in response to claims that the regulations would impose a 78% price increase for some In-County Periodicals mailers – and an acknowledgement that the penalties make no sense for copies that are sorted manually. It seems to help mostly small local newspapers. The national dropship networks run by the major printers of magazines and catalogs rarely deliver to DDUs, which is where letter carriers are based.
Among the problems the Postal Service didn’t fix are:
- Companies:
- Quad/Graphics
- People:
- D. Eadward
- Joe Schick
D. Eadward Tree is a pseudonymous magazine-industry insider who provides insights on publishing, postal issues and print media on his blog, Dead Tree Edition.
