There is nothing useful on this web site.
Even though the internet is the source of all truth, the only truth here is that everything else is a lie.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.- Oscar Wilde
I went to the mailbox around noon today and picked up the latest edition of The Economist for some lunchtime reading.
For readers here in the Netherlands, or in London, where I lived a few years ago, this would be the beginning of a real boring blog. But in my hometown of Calgary, Canada, that opening paragraph would be pure fiction, even fantasy.
Mail is NOT delivered on Saturday in Canada (though it once was), and certain pieces, like magazines, crawl through the system at a snails pace.
I can speak with some authority on this. We have made use of all three national postal systems in the last four years. I subscribe to one magazine, the Economist, and we have moved back and forth between these countries in recent years.
In London, I was absolutely amazed to see mail delivered on a Saturday. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the same is true in The Hague. More incredible yet is the fact that almost all my issues of the Economist arrive in our mailbox the day after publication.
In Calgary, delivery of the Economist was spotty, with wait times averaging about 10 days after publication. It was not uncommon to receive 2 issues on the same day. On one auspicious occasion, I received 3 issues in one delivery, which set simultaneous records for the best and worst deliveries of my Canadian subscription experience. I remember it was a Tuesday, which meant the latest edition that day was a mere 4 days old!
Saturday delivery? Please! Canada Post has done it's level best to eliminate home delivery altogether.
There are two levels of home delivery in Canada, largely determined by how old your neighborhood is. Older communities, of maybe 30+ years, have mail delivered to their homes, placed in quaint receptacles placed near the front door. Our parents called them a mail box.
Newer communities do not actually have home delivery; that aspect of the service was 'rationalized' a long time ago. Instead, there are mail dropboxes placed throughout the neighborhood where residents go to pick up their mail. It's not a long walk, but many people drive nonetheless. (hey - we're talking Calgary, Alberta here).
Homes in the newer neighborhoods might still have mailboxes, but they are mainly used to display a 'No Flyers' notice, or by neighbours who deliver your mail that has been mistakenly delivered to their dropbox by..., oh never mind.
When I first moved into one of these newer neighborhoods in Calgary, I was startled the first time I saw a mail delivery at our dropbox.
The delivery person had no uniform and was rather shabbily dressed. The vehicle he arrived in had no markings. It was an old, faded blue, hatchback, like the first car you might have owned - when it didn't matter that the doors didn't lock cause there's nothing worth stealing - oops sorry - I digress.
My first thought was that I was witnessing a looting. On closer examination, the time of the event made it too obvious, and the liesurely pace made it unlikely that it was actually a looting. The alleged perpetrator also appeared to be placing items in the boxes rather than removing them.
Meet the new age Canada Post mailman - casual, part time, and gloriously self employed. In Calgary, it can also mean homeless, but that's a whole other blog.
A friend of mine still gets paid via cheque sent through the mail. When expecting a cheque, he visits his drop box every day and often encounters the delivery person. The mail here is not delivered every day. When he inquired why this was, he got some story about how this is only one part time job of several and sometimes one has better things to do than deliver the stupid mail every day.
We moved to the Netherlands almost 8 months ago. Before leaving Canada, we paid Canada Post to redirect our Calgary mail for 6 months to an address in Montreal where we knew it would be reliably forwarded (by Mom) to whatever address we ended up at in the Netherlands.
The Economist is published weekly. It refers to itself as a newspaper, not a magazine, and its news content is timely and excellent. There is no best before date on the package, but it does get stale.
We had been in the Den Hagg for a whole month and had already received 3 packages from Montreal, but without any Economist. So I contacted the magazines customer service department and gave them our temporary address. I received the next edition that Saturday.
There were 4 back issues of my beloved magazine that should have been redirected to the Montreal address. NONE of those issues ever arrived at their destination.
Recently I recieved my September credit card statement. The bank remailed it to my current address in Den Haag, along with a cover letter explaining that the enclosed statement was returned by Canada Post as undeliverable. So it now appears that our mail redirect quit after only 5 months!
I wish I could say this came as surprise, instead it was deja vu.
Back in 2004 we prepaid for one year of international mail redirect when we moved to England for a project. Like the regular mail in Calgary, delivery of our Canada mail was spotty. That mail redirect stopped after six months.
Upon realizing that our spotty mail delivery had stopped completely, we made a few frantic phone calls to get the situation remedied. There was some arguing involved and no apologies. Some of our mail in that period was successfully Returned To Sender, but other mail appears to have been simply lost.
Canada Post was 'privatized' long ago. It operates as a corporation now, and has reliably generated a 'profit' for a dozen consective years. Long gone are the postal strikes and labour strife that use to mark her Majesty's Royal Post. Much work is now contracted out to cheap, part time, casual labour.
A Canada Post web page makes the boast that "Canada Post's basic domestic letter rate is one of the lowest among comparable industrialized countries."That claim is hard to dispute because, if you cherry pick certain numbers, like a domestic first class letter (i.e. those bills and high-end junk mail), that is the case.
Let's do a some more cherry picking ... Here are postal rates for a 30gm first class letter for 3 countries in their native currencies:
| Canada $CDN | Netherlands € | England £ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domestic 1st Class | 0.52 | 0.44 | 0.34 |
| Registered 1st Class | 7.47 | 6.45 | 1.04 |
| -proof of receipt | 7.25 | 1.45 | 2.20 |
| Europe/Canada 1st Class | 1.55 | 0.89 | 0.78 |
Here are those sames rates adjusted to a common currency. GST has been added to the Canadian posted rate. Currency conversion rates from the Bank Of Canada web site.
| Canada $CDN | Netherlands $CDN | England $CDN | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domestic 1st Class | 0.55 | 0.60 | 0.66 |
| Registered 1st Class | 7.92 | 8.77 | 2.03 |
| -receipt of signature | 7.68 | 1.97 | 4.29 |
| Europe/Canada 1st Class | 1.64 | 1.21 | 1.52 |
My dear wife has sponsored children around the world through World Vision, and, bless her soul, she sends letters and little gifts to these kids from time to time. She has sent similar packages over the years from Canda, England, and the Netherlands.
Lets' be clear, our Canada Post is no bargain when it comes to sending mail beyond Canada. And our postal service is pretty shabby when measured against other countries.
Here in the Netherlands, the postal service that is so good at providing next day delivery and door-to-door parcel service is TNT POST, a public corporation that started out as the Dutch Postal Service.
TNT POST now provides mail services to 7 other European countries. It is traded on on the Euronext Amsterdam and New York Stock exchanges.
Below are some numbers of revenue and income from mail services for both corporations drawn from their 2006 annual reports. All figures are in Canadian dollars at current exchange rates.
Table 3: Revenue & Income from mail services (all figures in millions $CDN)
| Mail services | Canada Post | TNT Post |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 7300 | 5528 |
| Income | 119 | 1034 |
| Profit Margin | 1.6% | 18.7% |
Sources: TNT POST, Canada Post
And so this rant must end. Canada Post YOU SUCK. You're expensive, inefficient, and your service guarantees that the words Postal Service will be a popular Canadian oxymoron for the next generation.