Canada Post is getting rid of home delivery
Downtown house dwellers can no longer look down upon condo owners and suburban denizens for their tiny, locked mailboxes situated so far away from their living rooms. Canada Post announced this morning that it won’t be doing home delivery anymore.
Before anyone asks, yes: delivering the mail is Canada Post’s entire job, and it says it has no plans to stop doing that. The proposal is to move all of Canada from home delivery to what are known as “community mailboxes”—metal, multi-slot structures already in use at the ends of many suburban streets. Under the plan, which Canada Post says it will implement over the next five years, everyone in Canada will get a mail key, and will have to walk a little farther to collect each day’s batch of exciting offers from Pizza Nova, HST refunds and, most importantly, magazines.
Eliminating home delivery is just one of several cost-saving measures announced by Canada Post today. The crown corporation, beleaguered by competition from the internet, hopes to eliminate between 6,000 and 8,000 workers, mostly through attrition. It’s also cranking up the cost of stamps; starting March 1, 2014, the rolled variety will go up to 35 per cent to 85 cents, and one-off stamp purchases will cost a loonie.
The real winners here, obviously, are Amazon’s airborne, package-delivering drones—but just wait until they try to unionize.
