A Stamp of Approval for Postal Unit

Not long ago, Larry Pasternack was a typical American business owner with a typical attitude about the post office: He hated it.

Now the Irvine electronics manufacturer is leading cheers for the U.S. Postal Service, but he’s not shy about his onetime distaste for the operation: “You were treated like a nuisance when you went in with a question or a problem.�

Pasternack does all of his selling by direct mail. What he and other business mailers want from the postal service is advice on how to get their advertising delivered as quickly and cheaply as possible without spending days in line, shuttling from clerk to clerk.

These days, the agency is delivering all that and more, company owners say.

Pasternack said that advice from postal specialists has enabled him to more than double his mail volume without increasing his costs. His bill for 1.7 million catalogs last year, in fact, was $3,700 less than what he paid in 1992 to send 839,000 catalogs. And the books he sent last year had twice the number of pages of the ’92 catalogs.

“It’s helped my business grow 30% a year,� he said. “How can I complain about that?�

What happened was the result of a fairly simple change at the post office. Postal officials decided to group all of the business mail specialists together in a business center unit and to set up such centers in every major postal region.

The goal is to help companies take advantage of every discount and assistance program the agency has, with an emphasis these days on the burgeoning field of international direct mail.

“We used to wait for people to come and see us. Now we’re out there consulting with customers and marketing our services,� said Bridget Williams, one of the two specialists assigned to the Orange County business service center when it was formed late in 1991.

The business centers are spread pretty thin, though. There are just three for all of Los Angeles County: at 7001 S. Central Ave. for businesses within Los Angeles, one in Santa Clarita at 28201 Franklin Parkway to serve the norther part of the county, and one in Long Beach at 2500 Mira Mar Ave. The only other Southern California locations are the Orange County center and one in San Diego.

Although the personnel at each business center are trained in basic overseas business mailing matters, the postal service has assigned a foreign-mail specialist to the Long Beach office who is on call to consult with businesses throughout Southern California.

The Orange County center, now with nine full-time employees, is in the Santa Ana regional post office on Sunflower Avenue. Companies with sufficient mail volume to use it receive such free services as mail design and international mail consulting.

It’s not altruism that drives the centers, though. The postal service has invested billions of dollars in labor-saving, automated mail-processing equipment. It wants corporate customers, who account for more than 90% of postal volume nationwide, to prepare their mail so that it can be handled by the new equipment.

Many companies still do not know that the centers are there. Only about 4,000 of the Orange County’s nearly 70,000 businesses sought assistance last year, for example.

But by July, they will be lining up. That’s when a series of nationwide changes in postal classifications and rates for first-class and third-class mail start. July also is when a number of local ZIP Codes will be changed.

The ZIP changes will force many businesses to obtain new mailing lists for Orange County addresses. Orange County businesses in areas with new ZIP Codes also will have to change their stationery and the bar-coded return addresses printed on their return mail cards and envelopes.

Pasternack didn’t even know he had an account representative until a post office clerk in Irvine told him about the new business center in 1993. Now, “I can’t do business without her,� he said of business specialist Debbie Butler.

“She’s always there--every time the regulations change, any time we have a problem,� he said. Pasternack Enterprises makes several thousand types of high-tech electronic connectors for scientific and telecommunications uses. Its wares are displayed in an ever-growing catalog--its only sales vehicle--that it sends to corporate customers at lower bulk-mail rates.

Butler showed Pasternack and his employees how they could cut mailing costs more. Recently, she brought a team of specialists to sort, sack and tag 10,000 catalogs so the company could be certified for discounts under a new automated handling program.

The business center also has helped Pasternack obtain domestic mail-handling discounts for sorting and putting bar-coded return addresses on his catalogs so they can be handled by automated postal scanners.

Pasternack Enterprises has slashed its average mailing cost by 22 cents per catalog since 1992, despite a 60% increase in the basic postage rate.

In the same period, the company’s catalog has doubled to 80 pages and its mailing volume has more than doubled. This year alone, with about 2 million catalogs scheduled to go out, the lower mailing cost is worth about $440,000 to Pasternack Enterprises.