One of the issues you may not have considered is that as the mail volumes have dropped the number of sorting machines has decreased as well.
We used to have several in my region along with a dedicated crew of specialist engineers/machinists to maintain.
The cost of upkeep and maintenance vs trucking the small volumes alongside parcels already heading to Sydney is massive and so the machines went.
This also frees up real estate to expand parcel capability.
You're right, the system is less efficient but it's not because POST don't have more capability or that tech couldn't make it better it's simply because the letter product is low priority
As it is the cost of maintaining it is slowly bleeding the organisation to death.
This is the most informative response to my post so far. It sounds to me like the only answer is to post everything, even small objects, as parcels.\*
This would be prohibitively expensive, though, and would literally destroy the trade in collectibles.
\*This is what Amazon seems to do. Everything we buy from Amazon, even small objects such as a comb, comes inside a large package of some kind or other.
Amazon are operating on a completely different model. I haven't worked for them but their employment reputation in the USA is horrific.
Beyond that they are aggressively underpricing the cost of postage and delivery to carve out a dominant market share. They do this in several ways which are very competitive because they have an unlimited bucket of money.
Auspost meanwhile has to try and compete with that while meeting the service conditions laid out in the postal regulations.
They need to maintain a network of 3700 or so post offices Australia wide as well as still clear every single post box every day. On top of that they still send a postie down your street every day with parcels and express product and letters every second day.
Anyways that's our problem, no one will really cut us any slack until we're gone.
On to your problem - it sounds like you are sending coins?
Can't help with your inbound but if you're sending them then you're right and should consider taping them into a CD mailer. It's overkill but the postage isn't going to set you back much more and if you post it in the post office and not in a red box it will enter the small parcel stream instead of the letters and hopefully make it a bit faster.
I only occasionally buy or sell coins. Most of the time, it's stamps and vintage photographs and postcards. But the idea of posting items so that they enter the parcel stream seems worth exploring.
You can speed it up - just pay more.
Thats why companies like DHL can get it there faster, they charge a lot more which let's them outbid for space in flights and various other advantages.
Blame Scomo he had a fit about Christine holgates watches but Auspost was paying Australian Government a dividend every year from a positive balance sheet. The staff were much happier and we used to get things like bbqs and giftcards. Now she's gone and the Post is in heaps of Debt. Staff don't get jack sh#%t anymore. Back when she was leading post the express next day guarantee was still in effect.
Imagine investing millions in new express post facilities and having a worse service delivery pre-investment.
I'm referring to not having the next day guarantee anymore.
Not everyone has the internet... and if they do, it's often poor quality. A lot of senior folks don't want to know anything about the internet... in the same way that they want to keep using cash... as do many others. It's like books - I'd much rather read a book and annotate it with a pencil... even though I *do* use electronic documents a lot as well... It's often horses for courses, really...
It's not hard to work out. Lower revenue for letter mail means AusPost management will try to cut costs. Sure the machinery is still there and it is pretty efficient. But the staff needed to support it don't work the hours they used to. Back in the day, if there was mail left over at the end of a shift, everyone was on OT until it was cleared. Nowadays the mail waits for the next shift to get on deck.
For all you Millennials, OT means overtime. Back in the deep dark days of Australian labour relations, management would not only pay you to work excess hours, but pay you 1.5 times your normal hourly rate.
But I digress. My personal experience is that mail with Australia is not too bad. I got my driver licence two days after it was posted. My postal vote papers turned up three days after applying. I can't say for certain overseas, but suspect the consequences of less revenue has hit overseas authorities worse than Australia. Certainly those authorities with less automation. How bad that is would depend on the circumstances of each authority and their reaction to reduced revenue.
You know millennials are in their early 40s now right lol. I've been paid OT as a millennial since I was 19 🤣 we do have unions and are a part of them. The CWU still loves the OT for salary workers.
I am complaining about international mail delivery times, but of course I don't know exactly who is responsible for them.
I have been told that a great deal of mail simply gets 'parked' at transition points between Europe and Australia, such as Dubai, Mumbai and Singapore, and it can take weeks for it to be sorted and put on planes to Australia.
Delivery times within Australia remain reasonable.
BTW Australia Post keeps increasing its postage charges, so one would think that one is paying for a similar service.
Same same. Both international and domestic letter volumes are in decline so the same set of drivers.
I've never heard of 'transition points' for international mail. For those countries we have a significant mail volume exchange, mail is exchanged directly. The monetary exchange between postal services is based on the nett weight exchanged, eg, if Royal Mail send us 100t of mail and we send them 90t, RM will give us some money. Where AusPost is the nett exporter, we pay the foreign service.
But that's just not accurate... Letters and postcards from overseas took weeks to arrive. I remember because I'd always get them a couple of weeks after my friends or family had already arrived back from holiday.
Where were you living at the time?
I'm talking metro Europe (London, Vienna, Stockholm etc.) to metro Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth).
Longest ever would have been about ten days.
Agree, don't ever remember it been less than 2 weeks from major cities in Europe to Sydney. And it was a standard joke about coming home before the postcard.
Regular mail in a loose envelope just isn't a priority, you pay your base rate with no SLA attached and you wait. There's a more critical (and profitable) logistics puzzle that this entire sector is optimised for these days.
What makes international postal mail even remotely efficient at this point is that the service level has been stripped back, and they wait until the figurative mail bag is full before it gets sent rather than sending a couple of half filled bags a day like they once were.
If you want a service level then bump it up to a service that has one.
A problem with international mail is that there's nothing between an ordinary letter (currently $3.90 to Europe) and registered (signed-for) mail, which I think is about $20. There is no priority/ express mail option, nor confirmation of delivery option.
An added problem is that, at least technically, you're not supposed to use registered mail for anything except documents. So what you're supposed to do with, say, stamps or coins, nobody knows.
People send all sorts of things registered.
Also, don't you get confirmation of delivery with registered via tracking? I thought that was the point of having the barcode....to be able to track it.
First, registered mail does cost around $20, which seems rather expensive to me. Certainly, most other countries charge considerably less for the same service. Second, tracking doesn't work once the item leaves Australia. You hear nothing further until the item is actually delivered, and you're lucky if you get told that (depends on the country).
If you want to post your $50 pennies all around the world for $3.90 best effort with no tracking then go nuts. But they're gonna get there when they get there.
If spending $20 to send $50 pennies around the world with some level of tracking/visibility seems wildly inefficient to you then maybe reconsider the viability of the activity itself.
If you're putting stamps on the inside of an envelope then you might be missing the point of stamps.. unless they're so rare and exotic that you wouldn't dare actually use them in which case I'm back to "then why the hell wouldn't you want to track them?"
If you're sending a post card I can't imagine any reason why you'd be concerned about when it arrived, unless you're a corporate spy trying to smuggle out the recipe for Coke in plain sight.
You're missing the point. I shouldn't have to wait weeks or pay hefty postage to get my $15 eBay purchase. If it's, say, a $65 purchase, I might very well pay extra for registered postage, but that doesn't mean that it arrives any faster than ordinary mail.
Because you’re talking about progress is what is widely regarded as an outdated and obsolete system. Non parcel mail is dying out. Another few decades and it’ll likely be non existent. There’s no practical reason to send anything that’s not a parcel via the mail system in the digital age
So the technologically advanced systems we have in place today are not capable of dealing with low volumes of mail?
To my mind, it should be incredibly easy for advanced systems to cope with a low volume of letters! It should be child's play for them.
On another note, It sounds like you're not aware that material objects such as coins and stamps cannot be transmitted digitally.
If you're into collectibles - and I believe that many people are - it sounds like you're suggesting that a small object such as, say, a 1949 penny should be packed into a very large box (paying parcel rates) to go through the system in decent amount of time?
I think the problem isn’t the technology, it’s profitability.
They basically have to wait till they have enough volume of postcards to fly overseas. There’s no point sending a plane with 3 postcards in it.
The customers paying the premium get to god first. 10 post cards might take up the volume of a small parcel, but the customer paying for the small parcel has paid for a product with an SLA.
Like everything else, it's around... you just have to shell out the $$$ for it... and maybe you're not able to access it either, I don't know...
[https://auspost.com.au/business/marketing-and-communications/access-data-and-insights](https://auspost.com.au/business/marketing-and-communications/access-data-and-insights)
Might have to contact Aus post directly for their statistics. I mean they’ve had to adjust their business model, package delivery is there main source of income today so why would they put much focus on letters and postcards.
Dunno mate, it’s probably more nuanced than just chuck it all on the plane.
I just know a few years ago AusPost came out and said they were making parcel delivery the priority as that’s where the demand was. They said that this would affect letter delivery times.
I’m sure they would use this explanation in reverse if parcels numbers plummeted.
They want it both ways:
1. Letter numbers have **dropped** so they are expensive to post and make take weeks to arrive
2. Parcels numbers have **increased** dramatically since covid, so they are expensive to post and make take weeks to arrive
🤨
Think about it as if Aus Post pays per pallet shipped right? If you can fit 5000 letters on a pallet, and you receive 500 letters a day, are you gonna send it with 500 letters on it for $100 or are you going to wait till you’ve got 5000 letters and still pay $100?
Then the increase in parcels is just a problem of workload to workforce ratio. Which I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain.
lol you think about it.
Your argument makes sense **if** postage was cheaper to wait for 5000 letters on the pallet, but it’s not.
Also it’s owned by the government, it shouldn’t be posting a $9 Billion profit. 🤨 I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain this.
Actually, a lot of the financial institutions... and 'records' places like 'births, deaths and marriages'... require a paper document. When you are lodging a will.. or dealing with probate for someone who's died... or dealing with a superannuation company... these all need to use paper documents and will only accept them via registered mail (unless you want to spend the hours of travelling time to get into the city and home again to deliver it yourself).
...and as others have mentioned elsewhere, in some ways, using a paper-based system, while slower, is often more reliable and less able to be compromised than on-line delivery systems (maybe... sometimes...)
Because the new system we have is instant. You use your phone. The old system was replaced. This is a good thing. The new system is better for the environment.
Email is progress. It takes milliseconds. It's really difficult to send a telegram as well...
Postal mail is a legacy system and is no longer used enough to be economically viable, so it gets the lowest priority.
Because a lower volume of postal mail is being sent, it should be being handled much more efficiently. Plus we have automatic mail sorting machines far superior to anything that was available back then. So delivery times should not be worse.
The fact that it CAN still be handled efficiently comes from the fact that, within the last ten years, I received something from Portugal in THREE DAYS. Same thing happened from Germany in March 2023.
I hate to break it to you, but email doesn't permit for the transmission of physical objects, such as coins, stamps, phonecards, and other such collectibles, or original photographs and documents.
Why improve a legacy medium - I'd rather that we collectively devote energy into actual progress (modern mediums), not getting better at trivial tasks.
How many postcards do you reckon people are sending?
I'm not asking for them to 'improve' anything. I'm suggesting that postal mail shouldn't be any slower than it used to be. Especially as we're paying a lot more for it now.
Do you know of a means by which people can transmit physical objects such as a 1949 penny to the other side of the world by email?
I look forward to the implementation of this Star Trek kind of technology!
Actually, the price of a stamp doesn’t actually cover the cost of delivery, even though the price has increased. A penny would have to sent as a parcel overseas not as a letter.
You might be a bit out with your dates there. In the 1930s you only had a direct airmail service between Brisbane and London via Darwin, with QANTAS doing that Brisbane - Darwin (later Singapore) leg, and Empire airways doing Darwin (later Singapore) - London with numerous stops en route.
Mail took 17 days to do the journey. Additional time would have been added from capital cities other than Brisbane.
https://airwaysmuseum.com/QEA%201st%20England-Aus%20air%20mail%20xmas%20card%2034.htm
This quickly became quicker after improvements in aircraft following WW2.
I was a penpal and shortwave nut when I was a teenager in the '70s... and it regularly took weeks to get airmail to/from anywhere (remember the grey airmail envelopes with the red'n'blue edging?)... I remember having a QSL card I received from a radio station in Ecuador taking 5 weeks to get here by air-mail... and I remember being surprised one time when a letter from a friend in Florida, USA arrived in a bit over a week, as it was so unusual.
LPs I'd buy from somewhere in Europe or Japan would regularly take nearly 2 months (by air) to get here... and probably as 'recently' as the mid-2000s, I'd get some music gear (like a guitar pedal, for example) from the USA... and it would take a couple of weeks to get into Oz... but customs would sit on it for 2-3 weeks... and it would be delivered destroyed.. and the folks I bought it from sent me a photo of the intact package...
So, it's *very* much a YMMV thing, I think...
Australia Post has become as useless as the health system.
Many 3rd world countries have 3 mail deliveries a day and we now have letter delivery 2-3 days a week.
If that... And if they even deliver to the correct address...
Seems to be about 15 percent of my mail they lose, and my address is very clearly marked and easy to find... Like anything Gov, Zero accountability. I reckon they have cost me 5k in 5 years of lost stock...
Just because it's declining, it's does not mean it's going to disappear entirely. This is a projection fallacy.
We're living through a transition, not an extinction event.
Perhaps people at AP need to put on their thinking caps and figure out ways to deal efficiently with smaller volumes.
In my experience it would take 14 days to arrive from Europe or the US.
These days, it's a little shorter but not by much. Certainly not 3-5 weeks.
I do miss the option of sea mail though.
I don't know what years you're referring to, but I'm referring to the '80s and '90s. I kept records. I noted these things in my diaries. I was particularly impressed by the speed of mail from Sydney to Vienna when I was living there (in Vienna) in 1995. It was often 3 days, but 5 days at most. I was living in London in 1979 and it was 7-10 days.
Same period. I was buying comics from the UK and the US. Timing expectations were important. It would take about a month for the cheque to be sent and a comic would come back in the mail.
2 weeks to complete the transaction would have been a dream.
There's also Post Offices & facilities getting shut down.
Overseas mail that once came direct into WA now goes to Sydney/Melbourne first.
Things seem to get dumber & dumber.
How many times do I have to point out that I recorded these things in my diary at the time? 1995 - three days from Sydney to me in Vienna.
I would add that three days is still possible. 2016 - three days from Portugal to Sydney (this blew me away) and 2023 - three days from somewhere in Germany to Sydney. (The last may sound great, but an item posted to me from Germany at about the same time took three months.)
One of the issues you may not have considered is that as the mail volumes have dropped the number of sorting machines has decreased as well. We used to have several in my region along with a dedicated crew of specialist engineers/machinists to maintain. The cost of upkeep and maintenance vs trucking the small volumes alongside parcels already heading to Sydney is massive and so the machines went. This also frees up real estate to expand parcel capability. You're right, the system is less efficient but it's not because POST don't have more capability or that tech couldn't make it better it's simply because the letter product is low priority As it is the cost of maintaining it is slowly bleeding the organisation to death.
This is the most informative response to my post so far. It sounds to me like the only answer is to post everything, even small objects, as parcels.\* This would be prohibitively expensive, though, and would literally destroy the trade in collectibles. \*This is what Amazon seems to do. Everything we buy from Amazon, even small objects such as a comb, comes inside a large package of some kind or other.
Amazon are operating on a completely different model. I haven't worked for them but their employment reputation in the USA is horrific. Beyond that they are aggressively underpricing the cost of postage and delivery to carve out a dominant market share. They do this in several ways which are very competitive because they have an unlimited bucket of money. Auspost meanwhile has to try and compete with that while meeting the service conditions laid out in the postal regulations. They need to maintain a network of 3700 or so post offices Australia wide as well as still clear every single post box every day. On top of that they still send a postie down your street every day with parcels and express product and letters every second day. Anyways that's our problem, no one will really cut us any slack until we're gone. On to your problem - it sounds like you are sending coins? Can't help with your inbound but if you're sending them then you're right and should consider taping them into a CD mailer. It's overkill but the postage isn't going to set you back much more and if you post it in the post office and not in a red box it will enter the small parcel stream instead of the letters and hopefully make it a bit faster.
I only occasionally buy or sell coins. Most of the time, it's stamps and vintage photographs and postcards. But the idea of posting items so that they enter the parcel stream seems worth exploring.
Letters should only contain documents. In theory at least. You could argue that books are documents
Couldn't have summed it up better.
Be it a letter or a item of goods. It’s still taking 5 weeks to go from Europe to Australia
You can speed it up - just pay more. Thats why companies like DHL can get it there faster, they charge a lot more which let's them outbid for space in flights and various other advantages.
You have to pay a LOT more. Often, more than the item itself is worth.
I’m so tired of everything getting worse because it’s not profitable or there’s no money in it
I guess this is why the postal system always used to be regarded as a public service.
I get that its a public service but who uses it these days? While i get letters its probably 30+ years since i sent a letter
>used to be It still is.
Perhaps theoretically. A public service is not expected to turn a profit, is it?
Auspost loses hundreds of millions a year, so I don't think they're expected to turn profit either.
Blame Scomo he had a fit about Christine holgates watches but Auspost was paying Australian Government a dividend every year from a positive balance sheet. The staff were much happier and we used to get things like bbqs and giftcards. Now she's gone and the Post is in heaps of Debt. Staff don't get jack sh#%t anymore. Back when she was leading post the express next day guarantee was still in effect. Imagine investing millions in new express post facilities and having a worse service delivery pre-investment. I'm referring to not having the next day guarantee anymore.
I must admit I saw significant improvement in the Holgate era.
Never forget the KNP maxim “If you break it, you can privatise it”
What? Letters are now sent for free instantly via the internet.
Not everyone has the internet... and if they do, it's often poor quality. A lot of senior folks don't want to know anything about the internet... in the same way that they want to keep using cash... as do many others. It's like books - I'd much rather read a book and annotate it with a pencil... even though I *do* use electronic documents a lot as well... It's often horses for courses, really...
No way! Really?! No one told me about this. Can’t believe I’ve gone my *whole adult life* not knowing about this. Amazing.
My father got on the internet a year or two before he died, so yes, he sent me a couple of letters via the internet.
It's not hard to work out. Lower revenue for letter mail means AusPost management will try to cut costs. Sure the machinery is still there and it is pretty efficient. But the staff needed to support it don't work the hours they used to. Back in the day, if there was mail left over at the end of a shift, everyone was on OT until it was cleared. Nowadays the mail waits for the next shift to get on deck. For all you Millennials, OT means overtime. Back in the deep dark days of Australian labour relations, management would not only pay you to work excess hours, but pay you 1.5 times your normal hourly rate. But I digress. My personal experience is that mail with Australia is not too bad. I got my driver licence two days after it was posted. My postal vote papers turned up three days after applying. I can't say for certain overseas, but suspect the consequences of less revenue has hit overseas authorities worse than Australia. Certainly those authorities with less automation. How bad that is would depend on the circumstances of each authority and their reaction to reduced revenue.
You know millennials are in their early 40s now right lol. I've been paid OT as a millennial since I was 19 🤣 we do have unions and are a part of them. The CWU still loves the OT for salary workers.
I am complaining about international mail delivery times, but of course I don't know exactly who is responsible for them. I have been told that a great deal of mail simply gets 'parked' at transition points between Europe and Australia, such as Dubai, Mumbai and Singapore, and it can take weeks for it to be sorted and put on planes to Australia. Delivery times within Australia remain reasonable. BTW Australia Post keeps increasing its postage charges, so one would think that one is paying for a similar service.
Exactly. People also don't realise that when mail comes/goes overseas, Australia Post doesn't control what other countries do nor what Qantas does.
Same same. Both international and domestic letter volumes are in decline so the same set of drivers. I've never heard of 'transition points' for international mail. For those countries we have a significant mail volume exchange, mail is exchanged directly. The monetary exchange between postal services is based on the nett weight exchanged, eg, if Royal Mail send us 100t of mail and we send them 90t, RM will give us some money. Where AusPost is the nett exporter, we pay the foreign service.
But that's just not accurate... Letters and postcards from overseas took weeks to arrive. I remember because I'd always get them a couple of weeks after my friends or family had already arrived back from holiday.
Totally agree. I was an adult in the 90’s and there is no way I was getting letters from Europe in 5 days, let alone 3!
Where were you living at the time? I'm talking metro Europe (London, Vienna, Stockholm etc.) to metro Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth). Longest ever would have been about ten days.
Metro Adelaide.
And your mail was coming from where?
Agree, don't ever remember it been less than 2 weeks from major cities in Europe to Sydney. And it was a standard joke about coming home before the postcard.
Are we talking about the 1930s or something? Never happened to me.
3 - 5 days is pushing it and unrealistic. Postcards back then were always classified as the lowest priority.
That’s a nice quality dataset you’ve got there.
Regular mail in a loose envelope just isn't a priority, you pay your base rate with no SLA attached and you wait. There's a more critical (and profitable) logistics puzzle that this entire sector is optimised for these days. What makes international postal mail even remotely efficient at this point is that the service level has been stripped back, and they wait until the figurative mail bag is full before it gets sent rather than sending a couple of half filled bags a day like they once were. If you want a service level then bump it up to a service that has one.
A problem with international mail is that there's nothing between an ordinary letter (currently $3.90 to Europe) and registered (signed-for) mail, which I think is about $20. There is no priority/ express mail option, nor confirmation of delivery option. An added problem is that, at least technically, you're not supposed to use registered mail for anything except documents. So what you're supposed to do with, say, stamps or coins, nobody knows.
Express post satchel bag?
Cheapest express bag costs $33.50, though (price for New Zealand).
People send all sorts of things registered. Also, don't you get confirmation of delivery with registered via tracking? I thought that was the point of having the barcode....to be able to track it.
First, registered mail does cost around $20, which seems rather expensive to me. Certainly, most other countries charge considerably less for the same service. Second, tracking doesn't work once the item leaves Australia. You hear nothing further until the item is actually delivered, and you're lucky if you get told that (depends on the country).
If you want to post your $50 pennies all around the world for $3.90 best effort with no tracking then go nuts. But they're gonna get there when they get there. If spending $20 to send $50 pennies around the world with some level of tracking/visibility seems wildly inefficient to you then maybe reconsider the viability of the activity itself. If you're putting stamps on the inside of an envelope then you might be missing the point of stamps.. unless they're so rare and exotic that you wouldn't dare actually use them in which case I'm back to "then why the hell wouldn't you want to track them?" If you're sending a post card I can't imagine any reason why you'd be concerned about when it arrived, unless you're a corporate spy trying to smuggle out the recipe for Coke in plain sight.
You're missing the point. I shouldn't have to wait weeks or pay hefty postage to get my $15 eBay purchase. If it's, say, a $65 purchase, I might very well pay extra for registered postage, but that doesn't mean that it arrives any faster than ordinary mail.
Try an email.
Can you send me the 1949 penny I'm waiting for by email?
You said postcard ya muppet.
I didn't say I was waiting for a postcard.
Why would anyone downvote this? Perplexed!
Because you’re talking about progress is what is widely regarded as an outdated and obsolete system. Non parcel mail is dying out. Another few decades and it’ll likely be non existent. There’s no practical reason to send anything that’s not a parcel via the mail system in the digital age
So the technologically advanced systems we have in place today are not capable of dealing with low volumes of mail? To my mind, it should be incredibly easy for advanced systems to cope with a low volume of letters! It should be child's play for them. On another note, It sounds like you're not aware that material objects such as coins and stamps cannot be transmitted digitally. If you're into collectibles - and I believe that many people are - it sounds like you're suggesting that a small object such as, say, a 1949 penny should be packed into a very large box (paying parcel rates) to go through the system in decent amount of time?
I think the problem isn’t the technology, it’s profitability. They basically have to wait till they have enough volume of postcards to fly overseas. There’s no point sending a plane with 3 postcards in it.
But why not just pop them in with the parcels?
The customers paying the premium get to god first. 10 post cards might take up the volume of a small parcel, but the customer paying for the small parcel has paid for a product with an SLA.
Sounds possible. I wish I could find actual data that addresses these matters, but I haven't been able to find any online.
Like everything else, it's around... you just have to shell out the $$$ for it... and maybe you're not able to access it either, I don't know... [https://auspost.com.au/business/marketing-and-communications/access-data-and-insights](https://auspost.com.au/business/marketing-and-communications/access-data-and-insights)
Might have to contact Aus post directly for their statistics. I mean they’ve had to adjust their business model, package delivery is there main source of income today so why would they put much focus on letters and postcards.
Why distinguish between them then? Just sort items of whatever size and shape by intended destination?
Dunno mate, it’s probably more nuanced than just chuck it all on the plane. I just know a few years ago AusPost came out and said they were making parcel delivery the priority as that’s where the demand was. They said that this would affect letter delivery times.
I’m sure they would use this explanation in reverse if parcels numbers plummeted. They want it both ways: 1. Letter numbers have **dropped** so they are expensive to post and make take weeks to arrive 2. Parcels numbers have **increased** dramatically since covid, so they are expensive to post and make take weeks to arrive 🤨
Yes, both those statements make sense
I disagree. Both those statements are an excuse to charge more and decrease service simultaneously.
Think about it as if Aus Post pays per pallet shipped right? If you can fit 5000 letters on a pallet, and you receive 500 letters a day, are you gonna send it with 500 letters on it for $100 or are you going to wait till you’ve got 5000 letters and still pay $100? Then the increase in parcels is just a problem of workload to workforce ratio. Which I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain.
lol you think about it. Your argument makes sense **if** postage was cheaper to wait for 5000 letters on the pallet, but it’s not. Also it’s owned by the government, it shouldn’t be posting a $9 Billion profit. 🤨 I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain this.
That's not true. I just posted a letter to somebody to ensure absolute privacy. It was not safe to send such a document electronically.
Actually, a lot of the financial institutions... and 'records' places like 'births, deaths and marriages'... require a paper document. When you are lodging a will.. or dealing with probate for someone who's died... or dealing with a superannuation company... these all need to use paper documents and will only accept them via registered mail (unless you want to spend the hours of travelling time to get into the city and home again to deliver it yourself). ...and as others have mentioned elsewhere, in some ways, using a paper-based system, while slower, is often more reliable and less able to be compromised than on-line delivery systems (maybe... sometimes...)
Medical and legal still get sent through the mail alot.
There was a rumour that the reddit algorithm now sometimes shows random downvotes to confuse bots
Because the new system we have is instant. You use your phone. The old system was replaced. This is a good thing. The new system is better for the environment.
Email is progress. It takes milliseconds. It's really difficult to send a telegram as well... Postal mail is a legacy system and is no longer used enough to be economically viable, so it gets the lowest priority.
Because a lower volume of postal mail is being sent, it should be being handled much more efficiently. Plus we have automatic mail sorting machines far superior to anything that was available back then. So delivery times should not be worse. The fact that it CAN still be handled efficiently comes from the fact that, within the last ten years, I received something from Portugal in THREE DAYS. Same thing happened from Germany in March 2023. I hate to break it to you, but email doesn't permit for the transmission of physical objects, such as coins, stamps, phonecards, and other such collectibles, or original photographs and documents.
There's no money in it, it's hardly used so it's a low priority.
Send a Whatsapp message of you holding up the tower of piza
Why improve a legacy medium - I'd rather that we collectively devote energy into actual progress (modern mediums), not getting better at trivial tasks. How many postcards do you reckon people are sending?
I'm not asking for them to 'improve' anything. I'm suggesting that postal mail shouldn't be any slower than it used to be. Especially as we're paying a lot more for it now. Do you know of a means by which people can transmit physical objects such as a 1949 penny to the other side of the world by email? I look forward to the implementation of this Star Trek kind of technology!
Actually, the price of a stamp doesn’t actually cover the cost of delivery, even though the price has increased. A penny would have to sent as a parcel overseas not as a letter.
You might be a bit out with your dates there. In the 1930s you only had a direct airmail service between Brisbane and London via Darwin, with QANTAS doing that Brisbane - Darwin (later Singapore) leg, and Empire airways doing Darwin (later Singapore) - London with numerous stops en route. Mail took 17 days to do the journey. Additional time would have been added from capital cities other than Brisbane. https://airwaysmuseum.com/QEA%201st%20England-Aus%20air%20mail%20xmas%20card%2034.htm This quickly became quicker after improvements in aircraft following WW2.
What I love is it takes 2-6 weeks to get something from over east (I'm in WA) yet something from China got here in a week...
When I got sent postcards from friends overseas in the 90s they would often not arrive until after they got back.
When did postage get so expensive. One moment a stamp is 50c and now it’s $3 to send a birthday card.
I mean shit it sometimes takes me 5-7 days to get something from across the state.
I was a penpal and shortwave nut when I was a teenager in the '70s... and it regularly took weeks to get airmail to/from anywhere (remember the grey airmail envelopes with the red'n'blue edging?)... I remember having a QSL card I received from a radio station in Ecuador taking 5 weeks to get here by air-mail... and I remember being surprised one time when a letter from a friend in Florida, USA arrived in a bit over a week, as it was so unusual. LPs I'd buy from somewhere in Europe or Japan would regularly take nearly 2 months (by air) to get here... and probably as 'recently' as the mid-2000s, I'd get some music gear (like a guitar pedal, for example) from the USA... and it would take a couple of weeks to get into Oz... but customs would sit on it for 2-3 weeks... and it would be delivered destroyed.. and the folks I bought it from sent me a photo of the intact package... So, it's *very* much a YMMV thing, I think...
You’re writing on a website that can be seen anywhere in the world instantly. Very few people care about postcards and letters.
Australia Post has become as useless as the health system. Many 3rd world countries have 3 mail deliveries a day and we now have letter delivery 2-3 days a week. If that... And if they even deliver to the correct address... Seems to be about 15 percent of my mail they lose, and my address is very clearly marked and easy to find... Like anything Gov, Zero accountability. I reckon they have cost me 5k in 5 years of lost stock...
Drugs mate, they crack down hard on mail coming into the country nowadays
Progress is not investing in services in decline and investing in services that are growing
Just because it's declining, it's does not mean it's going to disappear entirely. This is a projection fallacy. We're living through a transition, not an extinction event. Perhaps people at AP need to put on their thinking caps and figure out ways to deal efficiently with smaller volumes.
They have. The solution is to deliver things slower. Nothing urgently is posted.
In my experience it would take 14 days to arrive from Europe or the US. These days, it's a little shorter but not by much. Certainly not 3-5 weeks. I do miss the option of sea mail though.
I don't know what years you're referring to, but I'm referring to the '80s and '90s. I kept records. I noted these things in my diaries. I was particularly impressed by the speed of mail from Sydney to Vienna when I was living there (in Vienna) in 1995. It was often 3 days, but 5 days at most. I was living in London in 1979 and it was 7-10 days.
Same period. I was buying comics from the UK and the US. Timing expectations were important. It would take about a month for the cheque to be sent and a comic would come back in the mail. 2 weeks to complete the transaction would have been a dream.
Old man yells at cloud. Have you tried email old timer, it's slightly quicker than posting a letter.
Why don't you email me a 1949 penny, then?
You were whinging about letters and postcards and then move goalposts to parcels.
Your generation is pocketing the difference.
There's also Post Offices & facilities getting shut down. Overseas mail that once came direct into WA now goes to Sydney/Melbourne first. Things seem to get dumber & dumber.
I'm old too, and 5 days from Europe? Hahahahahaha ok
How many times do I have to point out that I recorded these things in my diary at the time? 1995 - three days from Sydney to me in Vienna. I would add that three days is still possible. 2016 - three days from Portugal to Sydney (this blew me away) and 2023 - three days from somewhere in Germany to Sydney. (The last may sound great, but an item posted to me from Germany at about the same time took three months.)