AP pausing parcel collections in Melbourne again Oct 1 - Oct 6

[love_of_cars]

For eParcel and Parcel Post, all pickups, collections and business lodgements in Greater Melbourne Metro will be paused for five days, from 12.01am Friday 1 October to 12.01am Wednesday 6 October.

Read more:

https://view.email.auspost.com.au/?qs=3cbeef61f681b22de7c96b4d8a0d3a319382485877a3bf5a47d3c4055a2f17...

[clickbaitoz]

doh! i wonder if ebay then changes the acceptable timeframe for an item to be received so sellers are not punished for it? I ask this as someone who just started selling more regularly in the last few months & before that it was mostly large letters which i guess would not be affected?

[chameleon54]

I cant understand the logic. The mail is not going to stop being generated, just because AP stop moving it. If they stop collections for a week, its just going to result in a huge backlog once they start collections again. They charge us enough for the service, and their executives get paid enough to manage the operations. Just hire more people and go back to manually sorting mail like they did two or three years ago if the new mail sorting facilities cant cope..

Heaven help us when the Christmas rush starts to crank up if AP is already falling apart now.

[lynsh84]

It is not as simple as hiring more people Chameleon.

Back when Covid reared it's ugly head early last year the depot where my husband was working from (StarTrack in inner south western Sydney) had a sorting machine that could sort 10 times the amount of parcels that could be taken by the couriers on any one day.

It was quite a juggling act to arrange the sorting tables to take into account the safe distancing rules......there is simply no room to put any more bodies to work.

After the early morning StarTrack couriers left, the space was taken over by trucks and vans delivering for Officeworks.

Most of the AP facilities that we know of are in the same position......there is just no room to increase the staff, despite the huge increase in the volume of parcels.

Nothing has changed in 18 months.....there is still no room to increase the number of bodies in the facilities and no other suitable buildings to open more distribution centres withing a suitable distance.

[imastawka]

Delays ahead as Australia Post pauses parcel pick ups in Melbourne (msn.com)

[aussie-picker]

Its just a way to justify **bleep** ie NO service and high postage prices. 

[davewil1964]

Or they are over capacity.

If I was in Melbourne, I'm not, I would lodge over the counter. THAT is not restricted. Given the AP predilection to not scan that is what I do anyway.

Hardly a game changer.

[lynsh84]

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@aussie-picker wrote:

Its just a way to justify **bleep** ie NO service and high postage prices. 

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Do you mean that you don't believe the COVID rules are having an effect on Australia Post services?

[digital*ghost]

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@chameleon54 wrote:

I cant understand the logic. The mail is not going to stop being generated, just because AP stop moving it. If they stop collections for a week, its just going to result in a huge backlog once they start collections again. They charge us enough for the service, and their executives get paid enough to manage the operations. Just hire more people and go back to manually sorting mail like they did two or three years ago if the new mail sorting facilities cant cope..

Heaven help us when the Christmas rush starts to crank up if AP is already falling apart now.

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I expect that they hope at least a few sellers will find alternative carriers for most of their mail - halting pick-ups would mean disruption to some of the highest volume senders they have (i.e. the kind of volume that would be impossible to take in and lodge over the counter), but at the same time those are the kind of sellers who would favour the least amount of disruption possible and look for alternatives to keep things flowing as smoothly as possible. 

That in turn means these kinds of actions are also a kind of voluntary loss of revenue for AP, which they didn't even do when they couldn't send on all the international parcels they were taking, so I suspect it's a last resort measure. 

[twyngwyn]

FedEx now on strike:

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