Our Fading Postal Service !

A few decades ago the cost of a stamp ensured that mail would be delivered for that low price anywhere in Australia.  That range of deliveries remains, but the cost of a stamp is now one dollar. That was deemed a necessity because the number of letters passing through the mail has been steadily decreasing as the age of the computer and increasing business adoption of direct payments changed the way we pay bills.

For a while, the fact that Australia Post has a post office in every city suburb and every country town made it the logical place for customers to pay utility bills.  These post offices were also an agency for the Commonwealth Bank and these services maintained viability as the delivery time for letters gradually increased.   Delivery of local mail was usually overnight and now it may take several days - and often more than a week.

As delivery time extended and the cost of a stamp increased the post office  moved into a new form of business.  They became a parcel delivery service as online shopping thinned the ranks of brick and mortar stores and the heavy discounters were to be found in China.  Perhaps the novelty of online shopping is wearing off but we have more than a million citizens of Chinese descent living in Australia and it seems to be stabilizing towards a steady rate.

The profitability index for Australia Post is interesting.  Last year this government owned enterprise delivered a 41% increase in full year profit to $134 million.   Parcel deliveries increased eleven percent for a revenue of $3.5 billion while the letter rate fell a further ten percent to deliver $2.4 billion.

That ever falling letter rate shows no sign of stopping.  It means that a man or a woman on a motorcycle needs to visit every street in Australia at least once a week to deliver mail and that service must eventually make stamp costs prohibitive or see letter delivery combined into parcel delivery with each letter treated as a courier service.

It is noticeably that many young people have abandoned Christmas cards and birthday cards.  This seems set to increase as the population ages.  The mobile phone has absorbed that function and as letter delivery slows and increases in cost it is inevitable that the service retracts the letter post as we have known it.

The fact that Australia Post is still delivering a profit will delay that inevitability, but it seems that further into this century the common cost of letter delivery anywhere in Australia will change to a distance rate and that service will be carried out by the parcel delivery team at Australia Post.  It also seems likely that those prolific post offices will become a mere service counter in a local business.  In todays world it is volume that dictates survival.