Canada Post Announces the End of Urban Home Delivery 226
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."
ePost (Score:4, Interesting)
Canada Post already has something called ePost [epost.ca], 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:Slightly misleading. (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Some people won't bother to pick up mail (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Slightly misleading. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Able-bodied unemployed...yet cuts in delivery? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?"
Re:Slightly misleading. (Score:0, Interesting)
How the holy hell in a fucking hand basket did this tripe get modded "Insightful", I would have thought it would have gotten Flamebait or Funny, but Insightful?
Seriously, I have seen what Unions do and the good ones do great things, sure there are bad ones, but they shouldn't set the tone unless you are cherry picking.
I have seen good unions and I have seen bad unions and the only thing I have seen worse than a bad union is no union at all. See Walmart for them examples which are very rapidly becoming the norm. I would rather have a bad union than no union dealing with them people.
Most unions don't drain the company dry as that would be counterproductive to their goals.