US Postal Service dives deeper into e-commerce territory

Chicago

FACING a slump in the mail it had been delivering since the days of America's Revolutionary War, in 2012, the US Postal Service began aggressively targeting e-commerce and lapsed customers as the way to salvage its declining business.

"Really, it started almost at the level of cold-calling, talking to people who really hadn't spoken to us in a long time," said Nagisa Manabe, who joined the USPS in May 2012 as chief marketing and sales officer from Coca-Cola Co after a career in the private sector. "And really trying to persuade them to consider us as a very viable alternative in the shipping market."