Booksellers’ foe? Postage
Gary Kirk is the owner of A Good Read, a bookstore in my neighbourhood. He specializes in signed firsts and, oh, I have my eye on a couple of Morley Callaghans and, oh, danger lurks here if you like to keep a library at home.
Like many small booksellers these days, Gary does a lot of his business online, taking orders and sending them out through the mail. I was in his shop the other day, slavering over a rare e.e. cummings, when he brandished a doorstop of a potboiler of a book in front of me.
He said, with an air of wry fatigue, “I just sold this today online for $6.99. It’s 719 pages long. It probably could have used a little editing. I bought it for $1.25.
“If I was using Canada Post and shipping it to Hamilton, it would cost 10 bucks to send. But if I was sending it to Alberta, it would probably cost $22.” Amazon will ship it for $1.76. Are you kidding me? Alas, the post office bases its delivery charges on the dimensions and the weight of the parcel, also on the volume of traffic Gary generates, and on the distance from the point of origin, which in this case is Roncesvalles Ave.
You might, on the surface, think that this makes sense. It does not. He can ship a book to Montreal for $10; the same package sent to Fergus, Ont., will cost $15 in postage.
And yet Fergus is closer. God help him if he has to ship to Iqaluit.
Gary is a smart businessman. He sometimes resorts to ruses. If he has to send a book to Alberta, he knows it’s cheaper for him to mail it to a guy he knows in Niagara Falls, N.Y.; that guy will mail it to Alberta on his behalf, using the American postal service. Again, are you kidding me? Gary says, “It’s cheaper, and the irony is that they have an arrangement with Canada Post, so when the book is delivered, it’s a Canada Post truck that shows up.” The customer is none the wiser. Gary is my kind of guy; it eats at him that the Yanks know how to run a public service while we seem to have forgotten. So let’s talk about postal service in the States: Gary said, “If I’m shipping from Niagara Falls, anywhere in New York State, maybe it costs $3. If I’m shipping the same package from there to Hawaii, it’s also $3.” Breathtaking. He said, “They have a larger population; we are a small population over a large territory. And yet we can mail a letter anywhere in Canada for the same amount of money.” His voice dropped a register and slowed. “Canada Post could do the same for packages as they do for letters — they could pick an average rate that works for them. If the rate was, say, one kilo for $11, anywhere in Canada, I could live with that. And I’d be happy if everyone got that rate.”
But the big guys get a better deal, and little guys like Gary get hosed. He said, “I don’t want an advantage. I just want a reasonably level playing field.” That used to be a Canadian specialty, the level playing field.
Gary has written several letters outlining the unfairness of the situation. He got this reply from an official at Canada Post:
“Canada Post does offer incentive rate to large-volume mailers, such as Amazon. These rates are reflective of the very significant volumes of mail these companies sent on a regular basis.”
Gary’s reaction? “It’s not every day that I am reminded of my own insignificance, so thanks for that.”
The head of Canada Post, Deepak Chopra, called Gary to apologize for the insensitivity of that particular remark, but that does not make it sting any less, nor was he offered any hope of help.
Thing is, there are more and more small businesses in Canada that sell online and ship using the mail, which means Canada Post could help to drive e-commerce in this country. Instead, it’s driving business south. Oh, and just in case you think this stuff is a pipe dream, you should know that the Australian postal service offers flat-rate e-commerce package shipping from, um, coast to coast to coast.