April 14, 2008...6:47 am
Rant – has NZ Post stopped home delivery of small parcels?
Early last week I returned home from work to find a card from NZ Post in my letter box, saying a parcel was waiting at the local mail delivery centre for me, but only between 7am and 12.30pm. Hardly convenient hours for many households, including mine.
Curious what it might be, but assuming it must be something very big and heavy, as I get any number of small to medium sized parcels delivered to my home, I popped down to the delivery centre at 7am next morning. In return for the card I was given a small parcel containing a book I’d bought through Trade Me the week before. It was not registered, not a courier item and did not require any signature.
In the previous month, three identical-sized books, all in the same series (which I have been collecting thanks to Trade Me) have been delivered to my letter box. They easily fit in it. I weighed this packet on my kitchen scales and it was 800g. Even if that was too heavy for posties (which I doubt), I have had heavier, bigger parcels regularly home delivered, some by posties, others by NZ Post’s courier. It wasn’t as if the postage was cheap — $6.50. It might as well have been couriered for that price.
Wondering whether NZ Post had changed the rules and no longer home-delivers parcels (I recall reading it upped the price substantially not long ago), I emailed the inquiries section on the NZ Post website. When no response came after a day or so, I emailed their media section, saying I intended to publish details and their reply on this blog.
There has still been no response, not even an acknowledgement of receiving my inquiry. I find this unacceptable, so I am publishing this without NZ Post’s response, in the hope it will give them a hurry up.
Meanwhile, feel free to share any similar or different NZ Post adventures of your own.
15 Comments
April 14, 2008 at 7:34 am
Last year my daughter mailed a small parcel from Auckland to a friend in Wellington which didn’t get to the recipient. She sent another a few weeks later and it didn’t get there either. She then discovered she had the address wrong – right street but wrong number. She’d put a much bigger number than there were houses in the street so it is unlikely it went to another property. Putting the wrong number is entirely her fault but she had put the correct return address on both parcels and got neither back. When she contacted NZ Post she was told the volume of mis-addressed mail was so large there was no hope of getting something back. But how difficult is it for post staff to stamp it return to sender?
April 14, 2008 at 9:14 am
These cards they drop of is a lazy way of getting the customer to do all the work. It will only increase as more people shop on-line (and fewer post letters). I have had several cases of them leaving cards saying no one was home when in fact someone was. The arrogance towards customers is self-defeating.
Call me old school, but I still associate the Post Office with Telecom. Their continued arrogance was exemplified last week when I tried to reconnect to broadband. After dealing with two ‘help centre’ staff who couldn’t speak very good English, then a New Zealander who sounded helpful but didn’t do anything he said he would (and wouldn’t give me a reference number), I finally got someone who knew what they were doing. It involved getting me to get a third party to call their Kafkaesque maze and say that I had authority to use their account. Why can’t you call them? I asked. “Well the customer has to do the running around, we’re too big to do that.”
On the English-as-a-second-language issue, all I got was a blithe, Oh they wouldn’t be based in New Zealand so wouldn’t be able to help.”
April 14, 2008 at 9:52 am
It wasn’t a package that requires a signature before delivery was it?
[Poneke: No.]
April 14, 2008 at 10:03 am
The couriers sometimes make mistakes. Especially when it is someone filling in for a courier on holiday.
They may have thought it needed a signature when it did not. if you have picked it up, did they ask you to sign it? If not, did they offer any explanation for not leaving it?
April 14, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I live in an old flat with a mailslot in the door instead of a letterbox, so I’m used to getting cards when large parcels are delivered.
But here’s the annoying thing - the Mt Eden Post Shop is so close to my house that I can see it from my front door, yet the large parcels are always delivered to the Newmarket or Dominion Road Post Shops, so I have to either make a special trip or arrange for it to be delivered to the Mt Eden one.
[Poneke says: That is just bizarre. If I was a cynic rather than a sceptic, I'd say they just don't want your business. There is presumably some bureaucratic reason for it.]
April 14, 2008 at 2:29 pm
My impression of NZ post has fallen into that wonderful world of bigger bureaucracy, bigger government that we seemed to have invented. My experience with cards and parcels is similar. In one case they failed to deliver a fountain pen. Firstly it is necessary to deal with a call centre which refuses to put you through but rather plays middle man, with questions and answers. Secondly, rather than address the issue they then logged me with a complaint service which insisted on a ten-minute customer satisfaction survey - non of the questions dealt with my concerns - more bureaucracy.
April 14, 2008 at 11:03 pm
You aren’t imagining it Poneke and I also attest that the increased prevalence of this practise. Last year, NZ Post provided two weak excuses to not deliver books to me on two different occasions; firstly that the item was too bulky to fit in letterbox (blatantly untrue); that it was too heavy (at under 1KG??). At some stage in the complaints process I was given gobbledegook about health and safety issues. And, as have you, I have had similar material delivered without such problem in the past.
No longer “the mail must get through”. They just don’t make ‘em as they used too.
April 15, 2008 at 12:34 pm
The answer is quite simple. As more and more people are using couriers to send simple articles to each other instead of the post, coincidentally dramatically fewer people are writing letters, depending increasingly on email, texts and phone calls to do their communicating.
Thus, the volume of New Zealand Post’s business is declining rapidly year by year. Provision of a mail service is a dodo industry. Its no fault of New Zealand Post’s… its just a fact of life. Steam engineers and designers watched their industry fall through the floor last century, just as the postal services are doing now. No wonder the standard of delivery is falling off. The true cost of delivering your book to your door is probably more in the region of $30 than the $3 the sender was charged.
Sad, but true. The times, they are a-changin…
April 15, 2008 at 12:44 pm
i concur with the previous commenters.
i live in an apartment, so anything better than a letter attracts a “card to call”.
but i’ve seen them dropping the card off while i sit in my window with a cup of tea.
it must an operational decision to deliver cards instead of items. but, you’d have to wodner how much resource or time they’re saving having to run the parcels out to “places other than the designated address”.
that or they’re juts bloody useless. i’m going 50/50 on that bet.
April 15, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Hey Che… the up-arrow thingy key whatsisname gives you the capital letters. You just press it with one finger while you press a key and the letter comes up all big for starting sentences and stuff. Its cool.
[Poneke says: So are apostrophes. It's not hard to use them.]
April 16, 2008 at 6:56 am
meh.
don’t go oppressing me with your capital-letter fascism man.
it’s the interweb, anything goes.
April 16, 2008 at 8:12 am
its (it’s) like erm valid criticism of poor english aint (ain’t) oppression man what kinda chip do u hv on yr shoulder is every body who rites proper a fascist like as in death camps ‘n stuff?
[re lack of apostrophe]
Nice one Poneke, you are so right. Its not hard to use them, but it’s quite a task to use them properly, as I have just found out!
but honest ’bout the capitals dude it adds nothing to the standard of english to see no caps at all. this might be the interweb but geez mate wots the point in mangling the language just 4 the sake of it i mean really
April 16, 2008 at 8:35 am
Che present!
April 16, 2008 at 4:43 pm
I haen’t had any problem with parcels recently except they are taking MUCH longer to be delivered. But I have had several letters sent to me recently that were reurned to sender with “insufficient postage” stamped on them. In all cases the senders took them to the post office, pointing out the correct postage had in fact been affixed. It apparently is some sorting system malfunction but it has caused me quite a few problems. Its also crazy that if I post a letter addressed to a PO Box sitauted at my local agency it goes all the way into Wellington and back again
April 17, 2008 at 8:12 am
meeeeerc.
good to see it’s not all net noobs hanging round this place.
Leave a Reply