Parcel delivery boom at holiday peak
Wednesday is the last day to mail packages and ensure they will arrive in time for Christmas.
New Zealand Post chief operating officer Mark Stewart expects its storehouses to process and ship more than 3 million letters and parcels per day this week.
Stewart said the final day for standard Christmas mail, which falls today, will be the state-owned postal service’s busiest day of the year.
People sending their mail and parcels within New Zealand by close of business today can use Standard Post, ParcelPost and ParcelPost Tracked to get their package under the tree in time, he said.
But ‘‘if you want to mail something within the country before Christmas, Wednesday is the day you’ve got to get it in by’’.
‘‘Items being sent by FastPost, Courier Parcel and Courier and Signature Parcel need to be sent by December 20.’’
He said package volume growth throughout the year, and especially at Christmas, has been largely due to more Kiwis shopping online. ‘‘New Zealanders are already thriving on the online shopping … the boom in e-commerce is driving that.’’
Projections based on the company’s top 50 customers and other large retailers meant NZ Post prepared for 20 per cent more parcels than last year, Stewart said. Projections were for 41.5 million letters and parcels in December.
DHL Express New Zealand, another package delivery service, had its biggest delivery day so far last Friday.
Spokeswoman Victoria Russell said DHL staff would deliver 37 parcels a minute on average throughout December, or one parcel every 1.6 seconds.
NZ Post has hired an extra 600 staff for the holidays, 200 vans, 13 line-haul trucks, and an additional Boeing 737 freighter jet to make shipments across the country.
‘‘This would be the fourth plane in the NZ Post arsenal that delivers next-day-service packages, often across the Cook Strait,’’ Stewart said.
The company has opened two new operations centres in Taranaki and an automated site at Christchurch Airport this year.
Stewart expects the company to invest in additional automated sites as the business grows.
He said the automated centres did not put jobs at risk because there was still so much volume growth in packages.
NZ Post announced changes to PostShop stores earlier this month and has begun outsourcing more postal services to franchisees.
It is understood the company is planning to close more stores, due to falling letter volumes. Dominion Post, The Sunday StarTimes and The Press.
Managing director Sam Morse said the joint venture accepted the commission’s decision and had ‘‘got the message out of the market as quickly as we could’’.
When Stuff Fibre made the claim it had been intending to highlight the fact it only sold ultrafast broadband ‘‘because we believe it is the fastest and most reliable internet technology in New Zealand’’, he said.
‘‘The commission is very agitated about the telco industry and the telco sector and they are being very diligent, and we comply and we accept their decision.’’