Cutting Mail Delivery & Gift Cards for Christmas

Cutting Mail Delivery & Gift Cards for Christmas plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of night can stop...yeah, yeah, yeah but a little thing like a multi-billion dollar debt has the U.S. Postal Service crying UNCLE. They are hoping to move swiftly though to close some 252 mail processing centers and slow first-class delivery next spring in addition to ceasing their overnight delivery. More and more people use text messaging and emails to correspond these days and the Postal Service says they have seen a 20% decline in mail volume.

Do you have all of your Christmas shopping done yet? Holiday sales of gift cards are expected to be far higher than last season according to National Retail Federation’s Kathy Grannis.

GRANNIS: In fact spending on gift cards will be up with total spending reaching about 27.8 billion and that is up from 24.8 billion last year. Overall consumers will invest in department store gift cards, entertainment gift cards such as to the movies or a music event.

A big downside to gift cards is the number of people who tend to forget them or like me wind up with cards that have just a few cents left on them.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

According to the National Corn Growers Association the leading 2012 presidential candidates are quite lacking when it comes to their agriculture policy positions. An NCGA project grading the candidates on such ag issues as farm programs, energy, trade, environmental, and transportation found only two of the candidates going to the top of the group with an A and an A minus, the President and one other got a B; leaving the rest of the candidates with dunce caps on receiving grades of a D or lower. The project was not intended to endorse any one candidate, hence no mention of names here other than the President’s. What it was meant to do was provide farmers and ranchers with information they can use to evaluate candidates based on ag policies. So many times agriculture issues are not a top priority on the list of candidates campaign issues, which is bass ackwards if truth be told. Without agriculture where would we be? We all use and need ag products beyond the obvious, that we all have to eat. Political leaders need to focus on legislation that will make agriculture stronger, because to weaken agriculture means weakening society. 

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.