Our postal system is broken. I suppose you could blame that on Covid-19 as a lot more people are ordering things online and the Post Office has failed to keep up with the demand. But come on, already. They have had almost an entire year to get their act together.
Parcels now routinely take an entire month to get here, and then we have to wait in line out in the Canadian winter weather, to fetch them because our tiny Post Office only has room for two people in the office at one time. The main problem is not here though. For the third time now, I have tracked a parcel that almost gets here and then goes on an adventure to somewhere else.
My most recent shipment was sent from Stratford and then got stalled at Mississauga due to the Covid-19 outbreak there. Then somehow it went to Lanark by mistake. It made it back to within 12 miles of me yesterday. I went to the Post Office today thinking it might actually be there. But no. For some unknown reason, it is now in Ottawa again. It usually takes two days to get out of there so I may get it by the end of this week if it doesn't go traveling again.
Traveling parcels seem to be a thing this past year. One went by here on the highway twice without stopping while I watched the tracking notices. It was little, like the current one, and I thought it had just dropped between the others and been forgotten when other things were dropped off. Another package got as far as Ottawa twice but then went to both Winnipeg and Montreal before it got to me. What I'm being told is there is a shortage of shipping containers, so things get stalled. I figure things get so busy in Ottawa they don't even have room to take them off the truck and just send them on to some other location to deal with. That's highly inefficient!
The system is overloaded and cannot handle the traffic as it stands. When workers are sick matters get even worse. It's time the government realized that this pandemic will not end soon and that many people will now continue to buy online even once it's over. The Post Office seems to have done nothing to prepare for the ongoing work overload.
Locally there is a little truck that in less busy times sometimes actually tried to deliver the odd parcel. These days when that really would help the situation downtown, that's not happening. And since there is always a need for someone at the counter now, dealing with people shipping or picking up parcels, that must slow down the sorting behind the scenes too.
It's time for Canada Post to hire more workers, buy more shipping containers and perhaps enlarge their shipping and receiving areas. Right now, the old American Pony Express system seems more efficient.
