Canada Post pickup centres overwhelmed
Online shoppers are left frustrated as they scramble to track down packages hidden in overfilled small locations
Many Torontonians’ parcels are in limbo as certain Canada Post pickup locations have run out of capacity to process and store incoming items.
Canada Post spokesperson Jon Hamilton confirmed Thursday that three of the city’s 300 post offices are currently too full to store more items. Packages that can’t be stored at those locations are either temporarily returned to a Canada Post depot until space becomes available, or are sent to alternative offices with more space for pickup.
The problem, which Hamilton called a “short-term” issue, has some people scrambling to track down items they’ve been told are waiting for them.
Last Wednesday, Dufferin Grove resident Rotem Petranker came home to find a highly anticipated parcel delivery slip from Canada Post — a delivery he’d spent months waiting for.
Unusually, the slip — which is used by Canada Post to notify people which pickup location to go to in the event they were not home at the time of attempted delivery — had no time on it, only a location.
Petranker went to the 998 Bloor St. W. location to pick up the parcel Thursday, but it wasn’t there.
He tried again on Friday, and was told by employees they’ve been too busy to process the package and he should come back after the weekend.
He tried again Wednesday, one week after receiving the delivery slip, and the package still wasn’t there.
“At this point I’m super frustrated. I do want my package but it’s such a huge waste of my time,” he said.
Nadia Woinowsky-Krieger had a similar experience when she went to pick up a package with a slip she received last Thursday that directed her to the 7/11 at Dundas and Dovercourt Sts.
“According to the post office employees, there was no room,” she said. “Neither the slip nor the 7/11had any information about where my package currently is.”
The reason for the temporary inconvenience, Hamilton said, is that the period of time following Black Friday and Cyber Monday, peak online shopping days, is like a “tidal wave” for deliveries.
Anticipating a higher volume of deliveries around this time, Hamilton said Canada Post hires 3,000 additional seasonal workers and works with locations to maximize storage space. Still, “we can’t control when people come to pick up their items,” he said.
That leaves some of the smaller post office locations, like the ones located in drug and convenience stores, susceptible to overcrowding until customers pick up their packages.
Hamilton recommended checking the tracking information on parcels before heading out to check for them at the local post offices.
“It will be a short wait,” he said. “If we have a number of items that have sat for a number of days (at a pickup location), we will likely try to load them up and deliver them this weekend.”
Petranker said even though he’s frustrated that he doesn’t have his parcel yet, he doesn’t blame the Canada Post staff. “It looked like the people that work at this location, they feel really uncomfortable with the situation but they were very kind and they seemed like they cared,” he said.
Petranker and Woinowsky-Krieger were among a dozen Torontonians who reported recent frustrations with picking up packages to the Star. Antoine Belaieff, a Cabbagetown resident, suggested Canada Post adopt “packstations” — automated lockers where customers can retrieve their items, which are widely used by European postal services.
Hamilton noted Canada Post is exploring similar options, including a drive-through postal office pilot in Richmond Hill, and the installation of parcel lockers in apartments and condos, which collectively allow 1,000,000 households to pick up packages where they live.
Many of those households include young professionals who do lots of their shopping online. “Really, we’re seeing tremendous growth in comfort with people ordering things online,” Hamilton said.
Canada Post has had 60 days this year with more than one million parcels delivered, and is expecting to deliver twice as many parcels over the Christmas season this year compared to five years ago.