Postal Service December 2006 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The Postal Service \TM\ is proposing a major redesign of its international products including changes in prices and mail classifications. There are two main features of this redesign. First, we propose to more closely align our international products with their domestic counterparts for ease of use and added value to customers. This will be accomplished by merging eight current options into four alternatives by combining products with overlapping service standards and prices. We propose to rename the international products to mirror comparable domestic product names. Proposed enhancements to our international products would include increasing customer convenience through the use of domestic packaging supplies, offering the popular flat-rate envelope option in Express Mail International and adding the flat-rate box option to Priority Mail International. We would also offer more specific delivery time and tracking information to major destinations. The second main feature of the redesign includes a proposal to increase international product prices an average of 13 percent necessitated by cost increases that occurred during a price freeze from January 2001 through January 2006. The price increase also addresses changes in market dynamics while remaining below the cumulative change in the Consumer Price Index. If adopted, the product redesign and prices that we propose in this notice would become effective when we change our domestic prices (that proposal is currently before the Postal Rate Commission in Docket No. R2006-1).