The mail

There’s been a lot of media attention to the changes at Australia Post, involving a winding back of service standards.   Of course, in this electronic age, no-one posts as many letters as they once did – but I think most people still want to know that they can post a letter if they want to!  I certainly do, although I accept that I’m more traditional than other generations.   And, like me,  rural people often feel very strongly about these things.  Perhaps, however,  there are some of the internet generation who regard the mail service as irrelevant to their lives?

Be that as it may, the fact that change is happening is understandable.    We’ve got earlier mail box clearance times and less frequent deliveries.   However, my biggest concern is that there’s currently a lack of predictability in mail delivery times.   I accept that much of the time, we just want our mail to be delivered “as soon as possible”. but sometimes we want to have some certainty as to when the mail will be delivered, such as for birthday cards.  As has been said, “better the certainty of a disaster (that is, a long delay) than the uncertainty of a potential bonus (that is, rapid delivery)”!

I say this because in recent weeks, I’ve experienced erratic delivery times.  The context here is that we have a box at the post office, and so the mail arrives there every day (after all, we pay for this).    So, for us, it’s not an issue whether the postman does his round every day or not.   In one case, a letter from the other side of the city arrived the very next day, whereas other letters seem to take much longer to arrive.  We had one a few days back postmarked a week before it was delivered (perhaps from interstate, but maybe not), but this is not an isolated case.