[Dion]

RUSSELL WANGERSKY: Return to sender; cutting ties with Canada Post

I’ve always loved getting mail. I’m just not going to send any of it anymore.
And I’m surprised Canada Post doesn’t realize that it is pricing — and well, servicing — itself out of business.

I’ve always been slow at adapting to new things, but rather than suffer through the latest mail mess, I’ve finally gone 100 per cent electronic for Eastern Passages bill payments. Faster, cheaper, simpler.

Service has also been an issue. I’m not sure whether it’s Canada Post or a painfully slow letter opener at my Visa provider, but at least twice in the last year, my credit card payment — sent six business days or more ahead of time from St. John’s to Toronto — has failed to make it to Visa before they tacked on interest charges for late payment.

If you can’t get a letter halfway across the country with six days of lead time, you’re not earning your dollar as a postal service.

Meanwhile, my community mailbox fills up with unaddressed ad mail I neither want nor can stop, all of it coming from advertisers who somehow think they’re helping their businesses. It’s bad enough when I get one advertising letter from Bell offering service discounts. When I get another for a nonexistent apartment they seem to think I have at my address, I begin to wonder how they could ever claim to understand my needs.

And understanding my needs — that’s exactly what Canada Post has failed to do.
If they did, I probably would have limped along sticking preglued stamps to envelopes, filling out cheques to put inside, for the next decade or so.

Congratulations, Canada Post, you did what many could not — you taught this old dog a new trick. And that’s really something. There are early adapters, and then there’s me. My kids tell me they know a new social media fad is dead in the water the second I admit I’ve joined up.

http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/Opinion...-Canada-Post/1