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."

Comments

Slightly misleading.

[PhotoJim]

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.

Re:Slightly misleading.

[CreatureComfort]

I'd rather they raise the rates on all the business class garbage I receive. 9/10 of everything I get local delivered is a sales pitch to "Current Resident".

Re:Slightly misleading.

[davecb]

They don't at our cottage, where this is already in place. Instead, the boxes are about half as big as necessary, and the driver sticks a card in the box. You get to drive in to town to pick them up at the post office.

Re:Slightly misleading.

[compro01]

What I don't get is why they just don't just raise the price of first-class mail. In the US, as a lower-volume mailer I'd be okay with spending a dollar to mail something, I end up mailing something about four times a year. It'd still be cheaper than using UPS or FedEx or the like...

Because unlike in Canada where Canada Post control their own rates, postal rates in the USA are controlled by Congress, several members of which have interest in sabotaging the USPS.

Re:Slightly misleading.

[nblender]

wrong. I've had one of these community mailboxes for years. I don't mind going across the street to get my mail. What I mind is my parcels don't get deposited in the box because there are only 2 parcel boxes per community mailbox. The 'sub post office' you mention is a drug store 8km from my house. The post office depot is in the back corner of the drug store, kitty corner to the doors. The aisles are all set up so you have to zig-zag through the store past all sorts of impulse-buy type merchandise and finally past the perfume counter staffed by sales people who are eager to spray a fragrance into the air as you walk through it. Then you have to stand in line with a dozen or so other disgruntled citizens who are there to pickup their parcel as well. The parcels are stored in the back room and the haggard worker (singular, one only) has to do a linear search for each parcel. Picking up my parcels is like lining up for meat in cold-war era east-germany.

The other minor issue that I have is the CP worker doesn't come to the door with parcels that need to be signed for; even though they are supposed to. They just fill out a card and leave it in my mailbox. On occasions where I know my wife was home and home all day, I would check my ZoneMinder setup and see the postal truck pull up at the box across the street, and then pull away, with no attempt to even come to the door. When I get home, there's a notice in the box that says "Attempted delivery failure - No answer" and it means I have to line-up for bread again.

I wonder why CP is losing money?

Re:Slightly misleading.

[rahvin112]

Sabotage? No sabotage isn't postal rates, it's requiring that the USPS prefund 75 years of retirement pension in 10 years. That means in 10 years they have to fund the retirement for employees that haven't been born yet. That's sabotage. Refusing to raise stamp prices to pay for the prefunding requirement is just following through on the real sabotage.

Re:Slightly misleading.

[schnell]

9/10 of everything I get local delivered is a sales pitch to "Current Resident".

Exactly. Those guys, by sheer volume, are the ones paying enough money to keep the lights on at the post office. If they raise that rate too much, then advertisers will just find another, more cost-effective medium and the price of your Christmas card to grandma will go up to about $3, or maybe even more.

As unfortunate as it is, that crapmail is what is subsidizing the rest of the traditional government-chartered snail mail industry. And sorting through all the crapmail is the price (no pun intended) we pay for sending letters for less than the $8-$12 FedEx will charge you for a letter-size envelope at their slowest delivery pace.

Re:Slightly misleading.

[ahodgson]

The anti-Harperites are generally not anti-government. They just want the NDP in charge.

Re:Slightly misleading.

[ShanghaiBill]

If they raise that rate too much, then advertisers will just find another, more cost-effective medium and the price of your Christmas card to grandma will go up to about $3, or maybe even more.

Sounds good! I sent, maybe, two paper letters last year. I would be delighted to eliminate all junk mail from my mailbox for only $6.

Delivering urban homes is hard work.

[gumpish]

Canada Post is phasing out urban home delivery

Well, delivering homes sounds awfully resource intensive and is probably a departure from their charter to deliver mail.

ePost

[lazarus]

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.

Re:This kills on-line businesses

[compro01]

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.

Re:Some people won't bother to pick up mail

[nbauman]

I have arthritis. I can walk 4 blocks to the supermarket and back, but by the time I get home it's painful. But what am I going to do? I want my independence.

My post office stopped delivering packages, and I have to pick them up at the local post office. Every time I see a slip in my mailbox for a package, it means another painful trip to the post office.

Re:This kills on-line businesses

[fish waffle]

..and then you copy the key and have free random parcels forever?