Snail mail deliveries prove sluggish

Postal service underfire as tests show letters taking days – even weeks – to arrive. By Catherine Groenestein.

SNAIL mail appears to be stuttering to a standstill.

In a quest to find out exactly how fast, or slow, the postal service is, Sunday News reporters Catherine Groenestein and Jane Matthews sent letters from Hawera in Taranaki to destinations ranging from Kaitaia to Invercargill.

None arrived within NZ Post’s target of delivering 95 per cent of Standard Post mail within three working days after it was posted.

Letters took a staggering 15 days to reach Kaitaia and Christchurch while a letter posted to an address less than 200 metres away took eight days to arrive.

The trial mailout, on April 4, coincided with a spate of severe and significant weather across the country throughout early April, and this may have delayed the post, aNZ Post spokesperson said.

The letters were posted outside the Hawera Postshop at 4.35pm. This box was cleared at 4pm that day, aNZ Post spokesperson said. It was deemed too wet for the box to be emptied on April 5, so our letters were not sent on their way until the next day.

‘‘When it was cleared on Thursday, April 6, your mail would have been transported to Palmerston North overnight for processing. From there your letters would have been dispatched to their onward destinations the following day.’’

We also wrote to NZ Post asking for someone to get in touch when they received it. They never replied. All answers to the questions we asked for this story were supplied via email.

When Lorraine Kelsen in Stratford received the letter we sent her, it was, she said, ‘‘beaten up’’.

‘‘It was packaged in a plastic bag and looked like it had been around the world before ending up in my letterbox,’’ said Kelsen.

One letter arrived back from Coromandel on April 21 with a yellow sticker on it.

‘‘Your letters should have all been delivered to their different addresses, taking up to three working days after posting,’’ the NZ Post spokesperson said.

‘‘We do our best to deliver mail safely and on time, so it is very disappointing to hear of these delays. We regret and apologise for any items being delivered outside our service standards.’’

None of the people we wrote to send letters any more, although some still send birthday cards. It’s a nationwide trend. NZ Post said letter volumes had virtually halved in the past decade, and were in steep decline.

‘‘This is a decline of 8–11 per cent a year or a million letters a week,’’ NZ Post explained – via email.

‘‘NZ Post is modernising the way we deliver to match future demand as we expect these volumes to continue to decline. One of the ways we are doing this is by introducing alternate day delivery, where standard mail is delivered every second day, in major towns and cities.’’