Ending Daily Post Deliveries !

It is now perfectly clear that the old days of an " overnight post " are a distant thing of the past.  What is posted in a city now takes three or four days to appear in your city letterbox.  The days when the cost of a postage stamp covered delivery anywhere in Australia and the fact that the cost of a stamp has risen to a dollar ten is a big incentive to find other - cheaper - ways to communicate.  The writing is on the wall that the post office as we know it is abut to retreat further.

Australia Post's own projections expected a $109 million profit last year, growing to $161 million in 2021.  The decrease in the letter flow now makes it more likely that profit will be replaced with losses and this service is contemplating dramatic change.  It may be necessary to tailor the delivery to reflect the cost of a mail person on a motorbike making a call on every home in Australia on a daily basis.

What is on the drawing board is mail delivery retreating to once weekly and those suburban post offices being replaced by automated kiosks.  When the stamp cost broke the dollar mark it became a positive incentive for the business community to embrace direct debit as the preferred business mode. In instances where purchase volumes vary from month to month the bill was emailed to the customer in preference to being sent through the mail.  Those lacking the facilities to receive email were charged a hefty fee for post delivery to continue.

We are reaching the stage where retaining a postal service in reaching breaking point.  The days when the cost of a postage stamp covered delivery to addresses anywhere in Australia was governed by the sheer volume of mail making distance cost attainable.  Australia post conducts a parcel delivery in tandem with its mail service and that is expanding just as the mail is contracting because of the growing popularity of internet shopping.

It seems inevitable that eventually sending a letter will be included within the parcel delivery service and attract a fee commensurate with precisely where in Australia delivery is required.  It will have become a courier service, priced accordingly.  Australia post will expect to recover the cost of its mail service and integrating it with parcel delivery would be a logical option.

Immediate changes to reduce costs concerns not collecting from street post boxes on Sundays to deliver a saving of $7.4 million a year. There are also four thousand retail outlets scattered across Australia, about half of them in rural or remote locations.  It is hard to estimate how the range of services they provide can be dispersed to other commercial competitive businesses in an economic manner.

The numbers using the postal service dwindle each year while the post parcel delivery is constantly expanding.  We are fast reaching the break point where combining the post with parcel delivery makes sense.  This is a natural form of attrition and its implementation is governed by the falling volume of letters in the mail.   It looks like mail delivery is going the way of the Dinosaurs  !