Online shoppers keep Canada Post hopping
Online shopping has meant a 20% hike in seasonal parcel traffic
Even though it’s barely 7 a.m., Canada Post’s processing plant on Walker Road is in full swing.
Forklifts beep their way along the aisles with loads of parcels. Music is playing on the radio and a few dozen postal workers move between the giant bins, sorting the deliveries of all shapes and sizes according to postal code.
The quickest ones can process as many as 300 or more parcels in an hour.
Mail carriers wheel carts to the loading bay a few metres away where they stack the day’s deliveries in trucks. At this time of year, there can be so many parcels that trucks have to come back to load up a second time.
At the other end of the plant letters and flyers are ready for sorting. That includes holiday greeting cards, which haven’t gone entirely the way of the Dodo.
“There’s still a core of Christmas cards,” said Eugene Knapik, a spokesman for Canada Post, standing in the middle of the plant at 7 a.m. on Wednesday. “But it isn’t like it used to be.” Here, postal employees are working overtime sorting and processing tens of thousands of parcels, packets and holiday greetings.
“Our people are pretty passionate about getting everything delivered for Christmas,” Knapik said.
Under the plant’s bright neon lights are giant wire baskets and carts on wheels stacked to the brims with plain cardboard shipping boxes of all sizes, plus a few more recognizable items, too — someone’s ordered a crock pot, somebody else has an electric guitar on the way, another online shopper is waiting for a new upright vacuum cleaner and a lucky kid will soon get a Little Tykes play set.
Amid the sea of ordinary boxes is a parcel wrapped in Santa Claus paper with the words “Merry Christmas!” scrawled under the address in black marker. Another box, carefully addressed by a sender in Poland and wrapped in plain brown paper, sits on a trolley ready for loading into a mail truck.
These carefully wrapped parcels lovingly addressed from relatives are giving way to a disproportionate quantity of boxes with computer-generated shipping labels from the likes of Amazon, The Bay and Indigo headed out to customers who are doing their Christmas shopping online.
A decade ago, the proportion of personalized parcels would have been greater, said Lyle Mader, director of operations for the Windsor and London areas. Now, people can buy online and ship straight to the recipient without having to wrap up the goods themselves, so the colourful wrapping paper is a bit of a rarity.
With close to 85 per cent of Canadians shopping online now, Canada Post has seen a 20 per cent increase year-over-year in parcel traffic around the holidays, Knapik said.
Windsor and London currently lead the country in year-over-year growth when it comes to mail related to online shopping, he said. Between 2014 and 2015, Windsor has seen a 34 per cent jump in the amount of e-commerce-related mail.
Plant manager Jed Albertini said the change in consumer habits is clearly visible in the volume and type of mail being processed here. You can tell when a retailer has had a sale on flat-screen TVs after Boxing Day, he said, because the plant will get a whole skid of them.
Once, he even spotted a car muffler amid the online purchases, packaged up in spite of its awkward shape.
Canada Post expects its busiest delivery day to be Monday, Dec. 14 when an average 3,400 parcels per minute will get delivered to households all across the country.
The parcel rush has already started down here. On Sunday, Dec. 6, Canada Post delivered some 3,300 parcels in Windsor and a couple thousand in the county, Knapik said. They’re expecting that number to double this coming weekend.
November and December are so busy that the 450 Canada Post employees in Windsor-Essex work overtime and on Saturdays and Sundays to sort and deliver parcels.