First, it’s signed a 10-year contract to continue to use the Post Office to sell stamps and handle packages after Royal Mail is privatized and the companies are broken apart.

The move averts mass closures since the Royal Mail provides a third of the 11,500-site network’s revenue.

The contract, which takes effect April 1, will run twice as long as people thought it would.

Post Office Minister Ed Davey claimed the agreement meant that the future of the Post Office had been “secured.”

“Concerns people had about the Post Office becoming independent from Royal Mail were always misplaced,” he said. “Separation is part of our cure, but the 10-year deal struck between Royal Mail and the Post Office will give sub-postmasters and others greater confidence” to invest in modernization and digital services.

He pointed to a couple of new government contracts the Post Office won and “successful pilots of new operating models” as proving fiscal reform is taking hold. Of course, he’s also giving the Post Office £1.34 billion ($2.1 billion) in government subsidies

The Communication Workers Union (CWU) isn’t so blithe. It said it was “the end of the Post Office as we know it.”

Billy Hayes, CWU’s general secretary, described it as “the end of an era and an unprecedented step by the government – we’re not aware of any other country which has severed the retail post office network away from the main mails, deliveries and logistics part of the business. When people think of the Post Office they think of the whole mail network from post office to postman, sorting and delivery – but not anymore.”

The government’s turnaround claims are premature, Hayes said. “While some new contracts have been won they don’t replace the huge contracts which have been lost” and it’s unclear what will happen to the network when it’s ultimately severed from a privatized Royal Mail and turned into a mutual company itself, with employees sharing ownership.

Davey, the minister, acknowledges that real financial turnaround will take years yet.

Meanwhile, the government has also hired a pension expert to chair the new government-backed Royal Mail Statutory Pension Scheme that’s supposed to take over the Royal Mail’s huge pension liabilities so the Royal Mail can go private, with a smaller, fully funded pension plan.

At least it will if the idea gets the European Commission’s blessings.

Presuming it will, the government has appointed Alan Pickering to chair it. He is currently chairman of the pension fund advisory firm BESTrustees and is the former chairman of the National Association of Pension Funds and the European Federation for Retirement Provision.

The Royal Mail Statutory Pension Scheme is officially supposed to kick off April 1 but Pickering’s job will start sooner. He will chair the governance group that will monitor the Scheme in search of a “seamless transition” and get to wrangle with union reps, pensioners’ reps, Royal Mail and Post Office reps, ministers and the media.

Trust is obviously paramount.

Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), acted surprised, issuing a statement saying, “I am disappointed by the Postal Service’s decision. We have been making steady progress in negotiations, right up through this afternoon. Our negotiations have been innovative, professional and productive and have been conducted at the highest level.” Obviously the USPS has an entirely different perception of where things are.

The NALC is the larger of the two unions, representing 196,000 employees who deliver mail primarily in urban areas.

The separate talks between the USPS, the NALC and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union AFL-CIO (NPMHU), which represents 46,000 workers who work in mail processing plants and post offices, have been running on the fumes of two extensions since November 20, when the contracts expired. The last deadline was midnight Friday and the unions couldn’t wheedle another extension out of the post.

It is unclear why exactly the talks broke down but the unions are opposed to pretty much all of the post’s cost-cutting initiatives, which include cutting deeply into the workforce responsible for 80% of its overhead, closing unprofitable facilities, stopping Saturday and overnight deliveries and dropping out of its current healthcare plan in search of a cheaper one.

Workers represented by NALC got more than $15.7 billion in wages and benefits last year; the NPMHU folks got $3.5 billion. The USPS expects to lose $14 billion this year and may not be able to pay its bills by summer. It estimates that it needs to cut costs by $20 billion by 2015 to return to something resembling profitability.

A group of 15 senators, nervous in an election year, got the USPS to agree to delay closing any more facilities until May holding out the crumb of some unlikely kind of legislative fix.

With their talks in collapse, the USPS and the unions now have to agree about what to do next.

Rolando said, “Now that the formal litigation process has begun, we will pursue a negotiated agreement through mediation and prepare to vigorously defend our members in Interest Arbitration, if it reaches that step.”

He said the matter would automatically be sent to mediation under the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. And if no agreement is reached in 60 days of mediation, the issues will be submitted for final and binding resolution before a so-called Interest Arbitration panel that must legally consider all the evidence presented by the parties. However, it seems they could skip mediation and go directly to arbitration, which is unrealistically allowed to ignore the post’s parlous financial condition.

Meanwhile, the existing contracts will maintain. Being deemed an essential service by Congress postal workers can’t strike.

The USPS is already in arbitration with the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association. A fourth union, the American Postal Workers Union, ratified a new contract last year that will run until May 2015. It calls for pay raises during the term of the contract.

eBay has launched a new B2B ePAC shipping service that’s supposed to improve the 24/7 tracking and delivery of lightweight goods. It has two similar services: ePacket, set up in September 2010, to assist cross-border shipping between China Post and the USPS and e-Express, which has been serving Hong Kong Post and the USPS since last April.

Like its mates, ePAC offers an online shipping tool from eBay that integrates the back-end systems of all three parties.

It’s supposed to cut the shipping time between Singapore and the states from two-three weeks to six-eight days. Merchants can use it to take orders and print shipping labels using their eBay accounts.

ePAC charges a fixed rate of S$2.20 (US$1.70) per shipment, not exceeding two kilograms. The first 20 grams costs S$1.10 (US 85 cents), and every 10 grams thereafter costs S$0.35 (US 27 cents). It’s supposed to let more sellers offer free shipping.

eBay says ePacket now handles 90,000 packages a day from mainland China to the US.

Japan is evidently going to be next.

Called Outbox, the Texas start-up is so young it doesn’t even have a web site yet. But it has gotten the first $1.5 million of what is supposed to be $2.2 million in seed capital from Floodgate Fund, a self-styled “super angel” set up by Twitter-backer Mike Maples Jr., whose father used to be big at Microsoft before he retired, and a handful of other angels.

And as a result Maples and the two shiny new Harvard MBAs who are trying to put Outbox together got the start-up a write-up in both Inc and the Austin Statesman.

Apparently the idea basically copies Earth Class Mail’s. Outbox wants to open and scan paper mail intercepted at the post office and forward bills and catalogs and magazines and all to the recipients’ tablets. No mention of desktops or laptops.

And like rival schemes such as Zumbox, doxo, Manilla and, when it gets here, Volly, users could archive it.

Outbox CEO William Davis and co-founder Evan Baehr reportedly imagine their audience being busy mothers, who could still get physical copies although billers want folks to go paperless to save themselves money.

Instead Outbox means to sell advertising side-by-side with the mail and has the idea it could persuade the USPS to give it access to mail at the local post office. That way, the Statesman repeats, “People wouldn’t have to change their mailing addresses to use the service,” which sounds like Outbox also means to copy Zumbox’ idea of digital mailboxes that use physical addresses as their e-mail address.

Baehr told the Statesman mothers could flip through the mail in the car just when the call has been raised to outlaw American drivers from using any digital device, even hands-free phones.

Otherwise he said on his blog that he and Davis were “bringing disruptive innovation theory, cutting edge mobile UX, digital marketing, and US Post Office reform together in one company in order to create a new channel for content delivery.”

Outbox still has to finish product development and hire staff.

As an aside, VA Shiva, the India-born MIT professor who holds the US copyright on e-mail, told the International Business Times that the USPS could be saved if it took 50,000 of the people it wants to fire and use them to scan postal mail and turn it into e-mail for SMBs.

He’s apparently been telling the USPS this since 1997 but the USPS couldn’t imagine being run into the ground by e-mail.

He told the paper the biggest US companies have outsourced their e-mail handling to India “where the corruption is absolutely insane.” The situation is not only insecure, it adds to US unemployment. He imagines the USPS managing corporate e-mail systems, analyzing responses and sending responses based upon pre-determined answers. He has reportedly offered to train them.

Shiva was 14 when he got the copyright.

It’s concerned that e-commerce and product search traffic is going directly to Amazon. comScore estimates that in the last year Amazon has handled three-to-four times as many product-related searches on its site as Google, dragging Internet advertising along with it. Google may also be jealous of Amazon’s bring-‘em-in Prime Program, which offers quick delivery for an annual $79 fee.

Apparently Google doesn’t want to sell directly to consumers. Instead it wants to work with retail web sites and combine its existing product search, which directs shoppers to retail sites, with a new quick-shipping service that it intends to create and oversee, the Journal said.

The service would determine if a nearby physical store has the product in stock. Google could then offer the consumer delivery in a day or two for a “low” fee.

Google plans to test the idea in the San Francisco area. It may involve UPS and local couriers.

Amazon’s Prime Program is supposed to have helped push the company’s sales up 42% in the first nine months of the year.

Macy’s admits to being approached but says it hasn’t made up its mind.

Google reportedly wants to launch the service next year to tap into a US online retail business that Forrester Research has projected will grow 12% to $197 billion this year, with Amazon taking nearly $50 billion.

Same-day shipping is said to be both “ridiculously” expensive and complicated and Forrester figures Google would have to subsidize the cost of the shipping because buyers now expect the service to be free.

The move would also reportedly put Google in competition with eBay and Shoprunner, which runs a fast-shipping program like Amazon Prime for a consortium of big retailers including Toys ‘R’ Us.

Ironically Amazon is one of the largest buyers of Google’s AdWords-based search ads, worth hundreds of millions to Amazon. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was also an early investor in Google.