Postal Nightmare
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It has become stunningly expensive to send a magazine or newspaper through the U.S. mails. After a series of rate increases calculated to make each class of mail pay for itself, publications today pay about 100% more for their second-class postage than they did in 1971. By next year, if current Postal Service schedules hold, the increase could mount to 175%. Now, in a nightmarish great leap forward, Seymour Wenner, the chief administrative law judge for the rate-making Postal Rate Commission, has come up with a decision that would pile an even huger increase on top of all the others. His announced formula, which touched off alarm bells throughout the world of print journalism last week, is to cut first-class rates from a dime to 8½¢ and make up for the lost income in part by raising second-class rates yet another 122%. Added to increases already in effect or planned, Wenner’s scheme would boost second-class rates to five times what they were in 1971. Furthermore, there is the likelihood of still another 33% increase 100 days after the Wenner proposal is resolved. To survive, publications would need not simply loyal but also rich readers. TIME’S $18 annual subscription price, for instance, which even now reflects galloping paper, production and labor costs, could double and possibly triple. Reason: as prices rise, some subscribers would drop off, and prices would then have to rise again to cover editorial costs and other overhead expenses. Newsweek would perhaps have to make a similar leap, as would such other weeklies as Saturday Review, The New Yorker, New York magazine and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. Even monthlies, such as Harper’s and Reader’s Digest, would have to hit their subscribers with drastic price increases. Religious, labor and farm publications would also be severely hurt. Limited Audience. Reacting last week to the Wenner decision, Emory Cunningham, the Birmingham publisher of Progressive Farmer warned that subscriptions would doubtless have to jump from $7 to $25. Said he: “The only farmers who will be able to subscribe will be the quite well-off ones.” In all, rates for local mailing of newspapers would shoot up 250%; books and records, 96%; third-class bulk advertising, 35%; and fourth-class parcel post, 67%. The inevitable result, say Wenner’s critics: use of the mails would drop, Postal Service revenues would fall, and the entire system would be in a deeper hole than it is now with its $800 million annual deficit. The individual first-class user might save a few dollars a year. But, claims Coleman Hoyt, distribution manager of the Reader’s Digest, the saving would be cancelled by increases for other classes of mail used by the same person. “In the long run,” says Hoyt, “the people pay for everything.” The decision, reached after 20 months of hearings, is by no means final. As administrative law judge, Wenner conducts the initial hearings in the Postal Rate Commission’s cases. His decision must be approved or modified by the full rate commission, a five-member independent body, then go to the U.S. Postal Service’s seven-member board of governors, which has final say. Source : time.com |