@saarzi wrote:
"Mail volume โ of which 97 per cent comes from business and government - continues to decline and the letters service has accumulated losses of more than $1 billion over the past seven years. While the planned BPR increase and service changes will reduce the losses, they will not return stamped mail to profit."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I dont care about the changes, I sent about 50 small letters per week but it wont really affect my profit margin (Im not giving away anything about how I do it either Lol). Buttt....
This quote above is the part I like. Soooo.. if the price increase and changes arent going to return stamped mail to profit, why continue down the increase and current changes path???
No business that refuses to undergo massive changes over its lifetime lasts very long. Its the nature of business.
Its like... "I know this isnt going to work, but lets do it anyway".
Auspost has made some changes (very very few), and thats ok, but its not enough.. they need a massive overhaul on how they think about mail as a whole. They havent seemed to have even considered that they might need a complete rethink. Typical government business. If this was a private business these people would have been fired long, long ago.
They are doing that, but in a fairly simplified way - they're obligated to provide the small letter service, so my guess is that they treat it like any other business would a loss leader, and their parcel services etc make up for the loss in profit. (They probably don't mention this is articles like that, because they want people to focus on the loss - they usually only mention it when people are complaining about price increases on other services, which to me makes it look like an attempt to compartmentalise the issues in order to get specific public reaction, even though that's not actually how they are approaching said issues).
The problem for them, I suspect, is that they can't cater for the decline in small letters in a profitable way - emailing and other forms of digital communication, which has taken the place of a lot of small letters, are free (with the exception of a fax, I suppose, but that's pretty old technology these days), so no one is going to pay Australia Post to digitally deliver anything, and whatever the running costs are for processing and delivering letters, the current volume and revenue can't sustain it, yet they can't cease offering the service, or reduce the cost to do so except by lowering service standards. All that I understand, what I don't understand - or rather accept - is their lack of transparency. I trust them, and their facts and figures, about as much as I trust eBay.....as a seller ๐ .
