I send and receive a lot of parcels - and the speed and quality of the delivery service has plummeted in recent years. However, the biggest con at the moment is their “quoted delivery times”. If you go to post something you can ask the nice person who serves you the estimated time for delivery - however the quote delivery time is always far quicker than reality.
For example - sending a parcel from Sydney CBD(2000) to Perth CBD(6000) is something I do a lot of. The absolute quickest time via normal eparcel service I have ever received is 7 days. Looking at the past 30 deliveries, the average is 9 days. If you ask Australia post how long it will take they say “4-5 days” which is a joke.
Brisbane to Perth is even longer - averages 10 days and they quote 5-6!
I have a family member who has worked at AP for 25 years and she says she gets complaints all the time about how inaccurate the times are (they just punch the postcodes into their computer and it tells them) - she says she now tells people “computer says this, but it’s probably going to be a few days longer”.
Notwithstanding 8-10 days for a parcel to scan received to delivered(well, carded because they rarely actually bother knocking) is ridiculous, I think Australia Post need to be held accountable.
An ebay merchant I regularly do business with now shows delivery for not even half way across the vast city of Melbourne as changinf over time from 3 days to 6 days!
Any wonder Auspost is in decline as a delivery service? It is as if government is actively seeking to wind it down and spin it off to private enterprise at bargain basement prices as a distressed business to further their ever smaller government ideology where governments are meant to provide no services excepting laws where transgressions mean fines.
I think it is Australia Post trying to focus on premium (higher price) parcel/freight services to compete with others and try to make high profits in that part of the business. Times for standard parcel and envelope delivery service has less attention and therefore suffers. They need a profitable premium service so that it can subsidise the rest of the business since envelope mail has been in freefall for the past decade.
If one wants the premium fast service (e.g. overnight), one pays a premium for it. If you don’t, one pays for additional time for cheaper rates.
Government realise this and doesn’t want to be left with a highly subsidised and ineffective standard postal service.
The 3 days to 6 days is what Auspost considers their bread and butter delivery service, eparcel. While they may be trying to sell their overpriced express and courier equivalent services, their formal delivery estimates have become insulting.
I posted a small eparcel within the same suburb (the house was about 350m from the post office I lodged it at!!). It was posted at 10am on a Monday and was carded on the thursday afternoon. That’s how ridiculous Australia Post have become.
I find it puzzling that I can spend $1 on Ebay to buy an item that will be shipped from China at no extra charge - while in Australia I would pay an extra $5-$10 on shipping!
The federal government wants Australia to be ‘internationally competitive’, but that cannot happen without a decent, decently-priced, and rapid postal/parcel delivery service. If the government was serious about infrastructure, this is one area it would focus on. The cost and timeliness of delivery is vital to productivity!
Like others here, I ask how come I can get a parcel ordered, paid for and delivered free of charge from either the UK or USA in less than half the time it takes to deliver a parcel from 20km away in Sydney?
And those express envelopes for which one must pay handsomely are in fact NOT guaranteed to be delivered the next day at all. In fact the PO do not guarantee delivery at all, ever!
I regularly get a small parcel, only a few grams, from the US. The tracking shows that it takes on average 5 days from when I send the order until it gets leaves a delivery centre in Australia. It then takes on average a further 9 days to get delivered. The last time it came through Geelong and took 9 days to get to Axedale, about 150 K’s. I could have comfortably walked there and picked it up in that time.
A tracked package was sent to me. I received the following Auspost email advices (paraphrased)
“started”
“got it”
“in transit” (for some days)
“will be delivered tomorrow”
[tomorrow]“something happened it will not be delivered today”
[nothing for a day]
[next following day] delivered but no tracking advice sent and all tracking history was deleted at Auspost.
I have had ‘attempted’ delivery of packages only to get a notice saying that ‘Nobody was at home’. STRANGE, as;
I was home for several days and have direct vision of the path to my home! The door bell also works.
There was NO delivery attempt and
How could they delivery a notice form and not deliver the package (there was no need to sign for the package).
The package was delivered to a parcel post office 5 km’s away (yes, 5 (five) km’s away!
I pay for the item to be delivered to my home and NOT to a different address 5 km’s away!
This is misleading and deceptive conduct, other wise known as FRAUD (a criminal offence).
I am no longer sure I know what Auspost is supposed to be. I ordered something and received an Auspost tracking number. So far so good but in their exceptionally efficient manner it took only 1 day to move ~50 km across Northwestern Melbourne.
I understand once a day trucks, but. My parcels usually go direct to Sunshine West and are delivered the next day. I suppose I should be gratified there is no extra charge for the stop at Ardeer.
Just received a delivery advice for Monday from Auspost telling me a mob called PCA express is making the delivery on Monday.
Auspost owns Startrack express that has been a topic in its own right over the years but it seems Auspost are ‘outsourcing’ to more companies every year. As long as everything goes right no worries, but the opportunity for finger pointing when something goes pear shaped is getting ridiculous.
On a related topic I had a letter sent ‘priority mail’ from the USA on 3 November that has yet to arrive.
And this just crossed my browser…
edit: PCA Express may have been the courier company of ‘origin’ rather than another Auspost subbie. It is unclear. The tracking number works in both the PCA Express tracker as well as Auspost’s. It could be that PCA Express organised the shipment via Auspost. That would have to be top value added, I guess.
I’ve had three articles with no notification for the parcel locker, nothing in the PO box and no attempt to call in the last month or so - one just over a month before I received it by accident (while asking about another article) - one three weeks and one two weeks.
There are some good people who work for Australia Post and they are the only reason we receive anything - and there must be a lot of less than good people. I wonder though what part the culture or lack thereof has to play … I saw the same with Telecom years ago - the pride in the service went to WGAF with outsourcing, subcontracting, sale and all the rest …
In 2015, then Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Australia Post would introduce a two-speed mail service, with a regular service operating two days slower than the current delivery speed, and a premium-rate priority service. So you’re actually being forced to pay extra if you want to stop Australia Post from holding onto your parcels for a couple of days before they decide to get on with delivering the things.
Before this two-speed service was implemented, any parcels that I would order from the mainland would get to Tassie within a few days. Anything I order now gets as far as Sunshine West in Victoria and then sits there in Limbo for a few days before finally being sent the rest of the way to our Post Office box in South East Tassie. It’s pretty dodgy that the mail is deliberately slowed down unless you pay the ransom to get it delivered without it being held in storage to deliberately make it go slower. Purchases online rarely give you the option to pay extra for priority shipping anyway, so we have no choice but to put up with the held mail service.
Occasionally my mail ends up being mistakenly shipped from the sorting centre at Sunshine West in Victoria, after deliberately being held there for a couple of days, to Western Australia or even Queensland, which means it then gets held in the mail sorting centres there for a couple of days before being sent back to Victoria where it once again has to sit in Limbo for another couple of days before it finally ends up on the barge over the Bass Strait so we can finally get our hands on the thing.
The entire system is deliberately corrupted so that we’ll be tempted to pay the extra to get the service we used to have before Malcolm got his grubby political paws onto it.
Edit:
It seems that Australia Post is now sending parcels from Sunshine West VIC, up the road a bit to Ardeer VIC for some proper time-out storage until it’s time to put them back into the delivery system again. This new development has happened to my last two package deliveries which were both in the system after the new year started.
@NubglummerySnr, I guess as government sees this we should be grateful they are not charging us storage with GST at Ardeer and Sunshine West! Turnbull seems to have more than just the current state of the NBN for us to ‘thank’ him for.
I wonder what the overheads in sort-and-delay tactics add?
It looks like Malcolm’s force the mail to go slow policy by placing it in storage for a few days if people don’t pay for the premium service extends to mail from overseas as well.
I’m currently in the middle of another magazine part works subscription that involves 130 weekly issues. By the end of the series I will have built myself a 1:8th scale Back To The Future DeLorean with working lights, switches and other cool stuffs. This I get from Bissett Magazines in Australia, in monthly batches. Bissett, like most Australian companies, do not give any options to pay the premium postage costs as they’re trying to keep the costs down for themselves and their subscribers. So that’s another parcel I get regularly that gets placed into storage at Sunshine West in Victoria for a few days as my punishment for not paying the extra postage fees. Again, I don’t have an option to pay the extra fee, but I’m still punished by Malcolm’s slow it down to make it look like the premium service is faster policy that he implemented in 2015 as Tony Abbott’s communications minister…
The build I’m doing is supposed to be a scale model of the replica of the original A car from the Back to the Future movie trilogy. The model makers were using Joe Walser as a consultant on the build as he was the man who not only made the replica that they were basing the model on, but he was also the man who managed to restore the original A car after Universal studios let it badly deteriorate for 20 odd years. Joe made it quite clear to the model makers that of all the parts of the build they had to get absolutely right, it was the look of the Flux Capacitor. So he wasn’t very happy when he got the part in advance of the rest of the world and discovered that they’d made a complete pig’s ear of the thing. Most of the rest of the builders around the world weren’t happy either, so a modification needed to be devised by someone. People then discovered a Mini-Flux Capacitor that actually fluxed and was screen accurate to the movie prop which fitted just nicely in the model we’re all building. So I purchased one for my own build and, lo and behold, there was no option to pay a premium fee to ensure Australia Post didn’t hold it hostage for a few days once they’d received it from the United States Postal Service.
The package took the best part of a week to get from the USA warehouse to Australia and ,surprise, it’s now waiting in storage at Sunshine West in Victoria, where it’s been waiting for three days now. The policy that Malcolm Turnbull put into place when he was the Communications Minister is extremely unfair in that it doesn’t actually offer a faster option than already existed beforehand, as he simply slowed down the mail to create a need for a premium service, and it targets all non premium paid mail, even if the mail originated from overseas where there’s no way possible for anyone to pay the ransom money required that will ensure Australia Post doesn’t hold your mail hostage for a few days or so. We can barely get a premium option for online purchases and subscription services in Australia, so I don’t see how holding mail from overseas for a few extra days is going to benefit Australia Post’s bank balance.
Isn’t government grand. Pretty much every bit of mail I send to the USA is delivered in 2-weeks, and every bit of mail I get from the USA takes 5 weeks now, up from 3-4 before the priority sticker.
People rarely vote single issue, but between Auspost, medicare, Centrelink, the NBN, big tax breaks for companies but not for individuals while running a ‘budget emergency’, I wonder what it will take?
A willingness to think for themselves rather than be told what to think by most mainstream media? Recognition that now we have ‘the adults’ in charge we are worse off than ever?
Nope, my mother’ll never buy it - we need to turn to brain surgery.
Edit: Wait - how about MK Ultra… can we get the old CIA papers? Or are they already being used by… ?
?