Oriental Trading, which mails out 300 million catalogs annually, has been hit hard by rising postal costs.
Its new pricing structure will bring it more money even if people just plump for streaming, because the company will no longer have to pay postal costs.
The postal service regards this application of automation, combined with the use of ZIP+4 (a nine-digit postal code) by business mailers, as a major means of keeping postal costs under control as mail volumes expand.
One of the arguments made against Scottish independence earlier this year was that postal costs would go up if there was no cross-subsidy from England's big cities.
As more subscribers stream more content, as opposed to taking postal delivery, NetFlix will be able to reallocate previous postal costs to content acquisition costs, improving its library and stickiness with subscribers.
At stake are more than 100,000 jobs, part of a postal cost-cutting plan to save some $6.5 billion a year by closing up to 252 mail-processing centers and 3,700 post offices.
The stamps allowed postal costs to be pre-paid by the sender, rather than the receiver, and led to a sharp increase in the volume of mail.
Funding to cover postal costs was received from the Swedish Chiropractic Association.
For intervention costs we determined print and postal costs of the decision aid from actual expenses.
Practices were paid for administrative time and postal costs were provided.
Although this is a cumbersome method of providing return postage, we wanted to see if eliminating postal costs that might be a barrier for some respondents would have an effect.
