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Canada Post Announces the End of Urban Home Delivery
Lev13than writes "Canada Post is phasing out urban home delivery, raising the price of a letter to $1 and cutting 8,000 jobs to cope with dwindling volume and a projected loss of $1B/year by 2020. About 1/3 of Canadian homes currently get mail delivered to their door. Deliveries will remain weekdays-only and business will be unaffected (at least for now). Much like the USPS, Canada Post is mandated to be self-funded, but 5% annual volume declines and rising costs are taking their toll."
Buying stamps half a dozen at a time reduce first class rates to $0.85; businesses using postage meters will get $0.75. Not cheap, and still a big increase, but the $1 rate will be paid by a very small number of people too cheap to buy stamps six at a time.
As for home delivery, it'll be sad to lose it but the alternative, the community mailbox a few doors down from most houses, will have one advantage: parcels will be loaded into it for you to pick up. Currently if you're not home you have to drive to the nearest sub-post office to get your parcels. This will be way more convenient.
There seem to be a lot of them in the news lately. Some, like this, are created by disruptive technologies like the internet. Others by bad government planning. (See: ACA) Others by the economy has businesses. This will only force more change in the future, which will likewise create more opportunities, and more death spirals. Will we end up in Utopia, dystopia, or something in between? Whatever it is, it will be different.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Especially people who are disabled or elderly and are very well accustomed to having mail delivered right to their door...
So any mail they get through normal post will just sit and accumulate in their box... essentially turning these community boxes into a litter farm.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
All new neighbourhoods in the last probably 10 years (or more) have had these community mailboxes. This will just be phasing it in to older neighbourhoods. I've been living with them for about 6 or 7 years now and really have no complaints about them.
yay euphemisms
Retire at 55, collect till 85. Yay public unions.
Keep printing Ben.
I thought with the online shopping boom, couriers and mail delivery would be booming as well.
Well, delivering homes sounds awfully resource intensive and is probably a departure from their charter to deliver mail.
One year the USPS went before Congress to explain why a postage increase was necessary. Two weeks after it was approved the heads split several million dollars worth of bonuses. Wonder how much they're getting this year.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
They heard about Amazon's autonomous drone delivery and thought they'd quit while they were ahead.
Better known as 318230.
We're losing money and customers. Let's offer a shittier service at increased prices! I refuse to see how this won't work.
-Canada Post
It's really easy to imagine just going to a community box if you are an able bodied person with a vehicle but if you're elderly or otherwise have mobility issues ... well let's just say with the lengthy winters and poor snow clearing I foresee two outcomes:
-People not picking up mail for months at a time
-Old people breakin' hips
Ugh...
crazy dynamite monkey
Canada Post already has something called ePost, which makes most regular postal mail obsolete now. It sounds to me like they're helping to put traditional postal mail out of business anyway.
I'd like to have no mailbox altogether. The notion that I have a "postal" address (which everybody wants for some reason) that a human being drives a car to so they can fill it with unwanted matter printed on processed dead trees is completely ridiculous. Give me ePost for bills and a local post office for packages and I'm good.
What's your address? 127.0.0.1. Same as yours.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
On-line ordering depends on cheap physical-world delivery, and this will drive them out of business.
If they cut off mail, we'll either be reduced to post-boxes or parcel delivery. Boxes don't work for parcels, even in apartment buildings, where they used heavily. Parcel delivery has the same problem with boxes: everyone ends up getting a postcard and schlepping off to the local pickup point because the darned boxes aren't big enough to hold the parcel. And big boxes are unaffordable!
Parcel delivery, on the other hand, is insanely more expensive: it loses out on the efficiency of loading up a truck and doing every house on the street, one after another. Parcel guys have to solve the "travelling salesman problem" in their head as they zig-zag across the city. Street-by-street delivery is O(n), parcel delivery O(n!) (and NP-hard in the general case).
In effect, the government proposes we go back to the 18th century, and pick up rare and expensive parcels at a local substation, and pay through the nose for the manual handling that involves.
If you aren't one of the 1% who can have their servants pick up the goods they ordered, you're not going to order anything on-line. You'll go to the store, just like grandpa and grandma. (Of course, the government says they're "conservative", so maybe that's what they intended (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Do you guys hear that? That is the sound of Canadians not flipping out and loosing their shit and calling for the end of times due to reduced service.
It's quite a pleasant sound up here in Canada, unlike the noise Americans made a short while back.
We must support the blacksmiths, they're too big to fail! What we need it price support from taxes. Everyone will be required to buy at least two horse shoes each year as well. Those who cannot afford to buy horse shoes will be given horse shoes using tax dollars. Those who choose not to buy horse shoes will by fined $90/mo. That is all.
Anybody?
There were no computers. EVERYTHING was done by hand. How did it work? How did they manage to pay a living wage to the staff?
In rural areas of Canada, sometime the "end of the block" is 2 miles away.
In cities filled with multi-story multi-family apartments this might not be such a big deal, but in a rural area this may mean you might as well drive into town (15 minute drive).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I also see a lot of people only visiting their mailboxes weekly, like how they take out their trash cans for the truck to pick up, so mailboxes will be even bigger targets for thieves as there'll be more payoff for the effort than before.
Then the thieves will be performing a public service by making laziness more costly and painful. I mean if people are gonna steal shit anyway, and they will, might as well have some good come of it.
...is not a country.
Hopefully higher costs -> less spam.
The Canadians are so awesome at everything! Let's copy their health care system, too!
at least canada has health care for all the ACA in the usa is a bridge to it and they need to remove jobs from health care
What I want is a large recycling bin at every community mailbox.
In marketing, there are well-known positioning areas:
Non-starters are "the same for the same" and "the same for more", because these give customers no added value to their existing service. However, Canada Post has gone even farther by proposing "less for more", which can only work when there are no other options available. By offering less service, and charging more for it, Canada Post is *guaranteeing* that customers will seek other options where they are available. And in the age of the Internet, other options are available.
On the bright side, the Green Party must be pretty pleased. Canada Post's brilliant marketing strategy will save trees by causing snail mail usage not only to continue shrinking, but to plummet.
Why is the government delivering our mail anyway. That kind of work is much more efficient in the private sector.
Here's an interesting clip on the subject.
BRENNAN v. U. S. POSTAL SERVICE , 439 U.S. 1345 (1978)
ayottesoftware.com
OMFG, please read the summary before you post.
You at least read the line which states "Canada Post Announces the End of Urban Home Delivery" right?
Did it click in that "Canada post" isn't american?
By the way, I'm pretty sure that Canada is larger then any of the Euro countries and that might be factored into the price of stamps.
Canada is 9,306 km wide, not sure how you would manage "next day" on that.
"About 1/3 of Canadian homes currently get mail delivered to their door" WHAT?
I'm an American, and I have always lived in a city or the suburbs. I guess I take to-my-door mail delivery as a basic human right. I thought all first world countries had this.
Wow. my mind is blown.
As a Canadian I'm seriously embarrassed. A few years ago I lived in the US and was astonished that USPS was fast, reliable, and that people actually trusted it to deliver on-time. And even had Saturday delivery.
Canada Post has been under attack for a couple of (post Thatcher era) decades - part of the overall belief that government shouldn't actually supply essential services. It's now reached the point where postal mail is the last thing you think of when something has to be delivered.
Call me an old fashioned socialist fool, but there are a lot of things that government should provide to any functioning society: police, mail delivery, and public transit to begin with. Education and health care as well. Those are why we pay taxes - to ensure that essential services are available to everyone.
It's time to get rid of the idiotic mantra that government should be run like business. A lot of businesses are corrupt, nasty, inefficient, and act in ways that an individual would never be allowed. A lot of businesses close in the first year. A lot of businesses are run by idiots.
Three Squirrels
By joining Jehovah's Witnesses or another denomination that doesn't celebrate modern Saturnalia.
Which "Thatcher" are you referring to?
Parcel guys have to solve the "travelling salesman problem" in their head
I don't know about Canada Post or USPS, but UPS has computers to do that routing.
I'm Canadian and have lived in the US for years you are misreading/exaggerating things.
The difference is newer subdivisions (actually probably 15 years old) have "superboxes" where Canada post deliver the mail to. The other difference is we only get mail Monday-Friday.
If you haven't seen one they look like this: http://www.straight.com/files/styles/blog_main/public/shutterstock_153195602.jpg
You get a key to one of the slots. If they have parcels they put a key in your box to open one of the large boxes and you just throw the key in the inbox when you are done. Mine is around 3 houses away and i just pick my mail up on the way home.
Not sure "mail delivery" counts as a "basic human right"?
Did it click in that "Canada post" isn't american?
Canada Post is both American and not American because though Canada != USA, they're both on the continent of North America. Though Canada shares some mentality with Europe, it shares other mentality with its southern neighbor.
A lot of US suburbs have community mailboxes, and many areas have mailboxes on the street (as opposed to through-the-door delivery). When I lived in a community mailbox area, the mail carrier would bring packages or mail that didn't fit into the box to the door; if I had to go to the post office (their slogan: "when you have the time, we're closed") every time that happened, it would suck.
The point is not Canada surface, it is only twice the surface of EU. What makes door delivery expensive is that Canada population is much more sparse the in Europe.
Anyway, this is a sad regression. There was a time where western nations were able to do things for the public good, without whining everyday about the costs.
When I was a kid, we got a superbox. It was a big improvement, as we had to go to the post office to get or send mail before that, and it was about 12 km away. Superbox got put in about 50m away.
When I bought my first house, I got mail at the door. That was kind of cool.
When I moved, I ended up in a much higher taxed area (that was poor planning on my part), and I now have to go to the Post Office to get or send mail. Fortunately it is only about 1 km away.
So for some this could be an improvement, while for others it could suck. Depends on what you had before the change.
I'm not sure boosting prices and reducing service will help the problem of reduced mail volume though.
Totally agree with you on the density thing. UE = 112 people/km2 whereas Canada has 3.2 people/km2 which translates into vastly different delivery costs.
Not sure why people blindly accept government "trade-offs" like this like well-trained sheep.
On the one hand, we have a large number of able-bodied, sometimes well-educated people unable to find work, and often receiving government checks (for unemployment, etc.) On the other hand, we are announcing that we don't have the manpower to walk packages to doors.
Why can't we say something like, "OK, so you're unemployed, but you're also a high school graduate who can walk at least three miles a day. If you want a check, food stamps, health care, whatever, could you please get off your ass for two hours a day and deliver mail to everyone on these six blocks?"
Returning them to sender leads to a conversation about how Christmas cards are a waste of a stamp.
Having lived in Germany, the US and now Canada I can say with conviction that the postal service here is rock bottom. May as well close it for good.
Yeah, and who gets to read it?
I bet parcels to a community mailbox are also 'watched' . Huh, mail used to be sacrosanct.
I can't tell if this is an attempt at sarcasm, so I am forced to treat it at face value.
Ah, another True Believer.
The government's aim is to perform a service at cost. The downside is that there is not much incentive for cost control.
A private firm's aim is to perform a service AND maximize the profit for the shareholders, who would rather not work for a living like normal people. The downside is so obvious that I won't belabor the point. No, actually I will take it a step further. The reason any firm performs any service is profit, end of story. The fact that they have to perform the service is just an unwelcome side effect to them.
Looks like six of one, half a dozen of the other, in terms of where that leaves the consumer.
Actually our population is mostly in a band within 50 miles of the border, which makes broadband easier than in the central 'states. Presumably the same density equation applies to postal mail.
davecb@spamcop.net
This should not be a surprise to anyone. For years now, email has taken over conventional mail between folks (faster, and arguably just as reliable). But what is probably more impactful - companies are making many profit driven moves to cut down the costs of mailing. For example:
There are probably many many more such examples. In the race to reduce costs, expenses are cut, and the postal services are competing with lower cost alternative processes that no longer involve them.
The population density argument makes the assumption that the mean density is important. If, however, you consider where most people live (not in the far-flung reaches of Labrador or Yukon), but in small pockets clustered around cities, then the density actually becomes similar to E.U. or the U.S.A.
A little over 50% of the population lives in a narrow corridor close to the border with the U.S.A. and a large proportion of the rest is clustered around other regional urban areas. There would be some extra expenditure involved in distribution, but not as much as is implied by the mean population density argument.
"About 1/3 of Canadian homes currently get mail delivered to their door" WHAT?
I'm an American, and I have always lived in a city or the suburbs. I guess I take to-my-door mail delivery as a basic human right. I thought all first world countries had this.
Wow. my mind is blown.
The disparity between US and Canadian mail delivery quality is so high that many Canadians on the border pay for USPS post office boxes or third party delivery boxes. They cross the border a couple times a week to buy gas and milk, and pick up the mail.
It was so commonplace in my hometown that there was a 2 year waiting list for a USPS box. Then a couple 3rd party delivery box places opened up about a mile from the border.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Hey, don't look at us Americans. I get every letter and every parcel delivered to my door step too. And letters are usually delivered in 1-3 days, depending on how far it has to travel. In-state, it's 2 days max, frequently 1 for nearby addresses. Do letters shipped from Greece to Norway take only 1 day? Somehow I doubt that.
Those are why we pay taxes - to ensure that essential services are available to everyone.
Here in the US, the USPS is fast, reliable, delivers on-time almost all the time (there are rare exceptions, but 99% of the time it's on-time), and has Saturday delivery, and on top of all of that, it isn't funded by taxes at all, it's entirely self-sustaining.
I am a US citizen who moved up to Canada this past summer. The USPS is far better in terms of speed, reliability, customer service, technology usage, and price compared to Canada Post. I have been very surprised at the difference. I heard people making fun of CP before moving here, but I figured it was just like how people in the US make fun of USPS. No, it is not a joke. The service is much worse in Canada sad to say. A perfect example is I sent some urgent documents on Monday with 1-3 business day expedited service. By day 3 it has only made it through the nearby sorting facility and still has a continent to cross. :-S Will use FedEx or UPS next time.