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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.
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'
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.
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.
Those are packages. While package delivery is up, letter volume is way down. Over all the post office is still making less money.
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!
Canada Post thought of that years ago. The community mailboxes have sizable parcel compartments (usually two, one "C" size (13.5x30.5x35cm) and one "D" size (30.5x30.5x35cm) for every 18 normal "B" size (13.5x12.5x35cm) mailboxes) built into them. If you have a parcel, they stick it in the parcel compartment and put the key for it in your own mailbox.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
...is not a country.
..and then you copy the key and have free random parcels forever?
"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
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?"