How important is sustainability to shoppers? (chainstoreage.com)

A recommendation by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy not to raise prices in January 2025 for Market Dominant products, which includes First-Class Mail, was accepted by the Governors of the United States Postal Service. Accordingly, the price of a stamp to mail a 1-once single-piece First-Class letter will not increase. The Postal Service’s operational strategies are designed to boost service reliability, cost efficiency, and overall productivity. “Our strategies are working and projected inflation is declining,” said Postmaster General DeJoy. “Therefore, we will wait until at least July before proposing any increases for market dominant services.”

America’s largest magazines retained 95% of their circulation through the Covid-19 crisis, Press Gazette research suggests. Strong print subscription bases and growing digital issue readership have helped the likes of Vanity Fair, Vogue and the New Yorker grow over the past year. Our analysis of Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) figures suggests that magazines have fared better than newspapers through the pandemic. Press Gazette’s ranking of the 50 biggest US magazines by circulation shows that print remains the sector’s dominant medium, despite subscription and single-copy sales falling in recent years.

Keep US Posted, an alliance consisting of consumer interests, industry groups, newspapers, nonprofits and businesses, applauds the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations for directing the Postal Regulatory Commission, which governs the U.S. Postal Service, to study the impact of planned postage increases. The Committee’s action, included in the 2023 spending package, is a direct response to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s announcement that stamp prices will increase July 31 and every six months thereafter, despite this year’s bipartisan postal reform law designed to fiscally stabilize the Postal Service and prevent unnecessary postage hikes. “It is destructive for Postal Service leadership to squeeze every last drop of revenue from the mail at the expense of the American people,” said Keep US Posted Executive Director and former Congressman Kevin Yoder (R-Kans.). “In just a decade, Americans could be paying well over $1 to mail a single letter. Using the mail will become unaffordable for American families, as well as newspapers, nonprofits, and businesses that depend on the Postal Service. These excessive postage increases will decrease volume and revenue so much that it will ultimately hurt the Postal Service’s 650,000 workers and their ability to keep delivering for our country. Projected mail decline will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.