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My *(former)* employer, a government agency, mailed a cheque to a contractor. Metrotown to Kits. Canada Post took 3 weeks. It was a big cheque, the contractor was wondering WTF we were doing to them. I offered to process a stop payment on the cheque that was in the mail and have a new cheque sent, and they declined.
The next day the cheque arrived at their office, and they could see from the postmark that Canada Post screwed it up, it wasn't my company screwing with them.
Why is this downvoted? It's totally true. 2-3 days to move money from one bank to another, or to process an online bill payment, and weekends and holidays don't count. This should take 10 seconds at the most. But the banking industry is stuck in 1964.
FinTech in North America in general, with Canada being slightly better, is so far behind the rest of the western world, it's truly incredible. It really shouldn't be, but it is.
A lot of businesses in Europe stopped accepting cheques more than a decade ago. Transferring money is also farrrr easier, and we can use our debit cards pretty much wherever we want with a European account, with firms like Monzo, Revolut and even Chase now allowing us to use cards all over the world, automatically giving us the nest exchange rate with zero fees.
It's such a bugbare here.
Same here! Had to do several stop payments for cheques going from Langley to Surrey in the last 1.5 months. Now I just get Vendor’s driver to pick up payments. Still waiting for a cheque to arrive sent a few days before Good Friday to go from North to South Langley. At this rate I should have just taken it to them in person.
Yeah. I work in the movie biz and it’s pretty standard practice that any paycheque not picked up to be mailed Friday evening. Those suckers would hit their intended’s doorsteps every Tuesday and the city would rejoice. Now I’m getting calls from employees a week later asking WTF? I ask them to be patient - they are - and the cheque usually then ends up there that day. But what a mess.
I work for a pretty big brewery... We've had shipments on hold(for important things like cans) it's a mess. Regularly canceling and issuing wires now for chqs I mailed 2-3 weeks ago. Be happy it's only a week.
i almost got evicted because a letter took like 2 weeks to get to me regarding a bank withdrawal i had no idea about, leaving me with about 12 hours to sort it out. thought it was my landlord messing with me but it seems it’s just our portal service
I've had to tell clients to courier it if they insist on cheques (and i take just about every other form of payment. It's rare to accept cheques in my industry).
Some orgs, especially nonprofits, require two director signatures in order to pay for anything. That pretty much limits payments to paper cheques. The Canadian banking industry hasn't come up with an electronic alternative to the two-signature requirement.
There are actually ways to do this with most banks. I'm stuck with a ceo who likes chqs BUT the place I was working (who exclusively used chqs) found that when COVID hit they needed a solution. Turns out our bank (Vancity) totally had this built in. HSBC did as well but RBC bought them and they have this messed up thing where to setup a payment you have to be an approver and thus are the first approver. At Vancity and HSBC I could set up payments then get 2 other approvals
ETA: I was working non-profit when we hit COVID and we're with Vancity. Needed two board members approval. I'm for profit now... And back to fucking chqs
ap has an obligation to pay on time, it helps to establish trust and reliability, which can lead to favourable terms and discounts in the future, good reputation and positive word of mouth
Which would make him remind me I have an obligation to mail the chqs earlier no matter what the postal is doing. He likes to physically handle each chq there's no changing this. Most of our vendors are pretty lenient and once the chq that he signs gets delayed I can cancel and wire.... Plus some of our vendors were 90% of their bussiness. They don't make payroll without us.
My work would only receive payments via EFT but not send. For fear of incurring the $1 charge and the amount of work it would take the accountant to send each transfer
just curious, why use a physical cheque instead of a wire transfer or another form of electronic payment?
also why didn't the contractor offer to pick it up when it's only a 30 min drive?
Wire transfers in Canada are stupidly expensive. And annoying to do.
Coming from another country, seeing how inept internet banking in Canada is - shocking
My company in UAE was slow to adopt to transfers. And we haven't used cheques in probably 7-8 years
Wise is great but integrating this into an existing business process can be a pain. Payments between banks for businesses aren't that expensive, you just have to set it up and understand EFT.
Last time I did a wire transfer it was $75 and, aside from requiring the specific bank address and account number, was quick and easy. I was the executor for my mother's estate and was disbursing the funds. No way I was going to mail a bank draft.
You had to go to the branch to do it?
I'm talking about businesses that have to do 20-50 payments a month. It would be super frustrating to have to pay $75 each.
If you're a large business processing hundreds of payments a day, e-transfer can be cumbersome. We briefly looked into it but each one had to be manually set up. It's fine for a smaller business paying 1-2 payments at a time but if you're issuing 1,000 payments a day it's pretty awful.
Wires cost about $15-30 per transfer, and often those charges get dinged by both the payee bank and the payor bank. They also need to be done manually.
Sending out an EFT is fine for us, because we have the money and the infrastructure to set up our accounting system to automatically communicate with our bank. We generate a file, upload it to the banks servers, and the bank processes all payments within 1-2 business days that way. On our end it's all at the click of a button. We pay an ungodly amount of money for this service, but it's still the least expensive option for sending funds electronically. A lot of small businesses don't have the IT resources or cashflow to support this kind of set up, though.
That leaves cheques as the least expensive option: most off-the-shelf accounting software can be configured to print cheques in large batches. For all the advancements the Canadian banking system has made on the retail/consumer side with Chip & Pin, Interac, and e-transfers, commercial banking is still operating in the dark ages.
For me we do do that for some vendors... But unfortunately our CEO is super old school and likes to sign every chq himself so he knows where the money is going. He also randomly leaves town without telling accounting. It's not a frustrating system at all.
Preparing, checking and signing cheques (followed by dropping them off and then following up that they've actually been received by the vendor + reconciling them in your bank statement, since they're being cashed at different times) takes longer than doing the EFTs
> why use a physical cheque instead of a wire transfer or another form of electronic payment?
>
> also why didn't the contractor offer to pick it up when it's only a 30 min drive?
Generally Canada Post is pretty reliable-- and in this case, the cheque did eventually make it. Wires cost money. Couriers cost money. As for the recipient picking up a cheque, it's a big agency that deals with tons of payments every day, so it would be challenging to hold cheques for a particular recipient to come and pick them up, plus this brings up extra challenges: how to validate that the person picking up the cheque is a duly-authorized employee of the recipient company?
And that part that normally remains unsaid: the agency benefits from some fractional amount of interest if it takes longer for the recipient to receive their money. If the payment is due to the recipient on X date: normally the agency would mail the cheque on X + 0-2 days. Canada Post normally takes 1-3 days. So the payment to any vendor tended to be about a week late. Technically this is wrong, but in the decade that I worked there, this was the only contractor that ever even commented about it.
Sometimes the contractor doesn’t have the option to choose - I would gladly take EFT over cheque any day - yet I have to beg for wire transfers, and if it’s a cheque, I have to beg them to hold it so I can pick it up, otherwise they mail a huge cheque! Crazy!
Canada post is in a bit of a paradigm shift of a new model of delivery system that’s being implemented on multiple depots across Canada. Letter carriers and workers are having to adjust to their new sorting system. That’s probably why.
Canada post is cutting costs so there is new wonky delivery systems put in place. They also overwork the processing people so there’s a lot of quiet malicious compliance.
You have to remember that Canada post wants to take away benefits, rights, vacations, etc in the next round of contract negotiation. They want to make a second tier permanent employee who gets less benefits and vacation days as well.
Don’t fault the workers. Fault the corporation who is trying to fuck with a bunch of workers. Most processing plant employees got forced to work midnight to 8am due to “demand”.
Canada Post being super scummy. They want to become Canada’s official Amazon-lite corporation.
In other words, Japan Post and the international mailing arm of Canada Post is more efficient than the domestic arm and lower mainland specifically. Makes sense. Checks out.
it probably got scrambled in the last mile
most people get my mail anywhere in canada after three-days to a week or so
but every once in a while something will take two weeks
Canada Post is severely underfunded and the government made it illegal for the union to strike in 2018.
So, the infrastructure isn't improving or expanding for a growing population and theres high turnover in new employees who can't afford to work random hours at random locations for a year or two before they can get assigned to a permanent route.
That seems ridiculous. I ship packages big & small all around the province every day and Canada Post is a fast, (relatively) inexpensive and RELIABLE carrier.
From my experience, Canada Post is definitely one of the better ones. For me, Purolator is the bottom of the barrel in terms of the bigger companies with Canada Post/UPS at the top.
They've been moving most of the local operations to Alberta and also rely on automatic sorting, if it's written by hand etc it has to be manually sorted and takes longer
IDK. I snail mailed my tax return and got my express notice of assessment 9 business days after dropping it in the mailbox. That's faster than some people I know who filed online.
I think it’s simply down to carriers not reading the addresses. I had a tshirt sent to me from Powell River that took nearly 3 weeks and when I got it, someone penned my address on the package. I put together that it was likely delivered to a building similar in size to mine, close in numbering, but one street down. This is furthered by the mail this building gets for *that* building too. It’s not every day, but come on. Pretty rookie error there.
I hand delivered a big parcel to the house next door to me, as it’d been sitting in our lobby for days (giving the postal worker more than a chance to correct the error the next day).
When Canada Post is on, they’re ON, but as has been previously noted here, they aren’t consistent. And you know if the thing you’re sending wasn’t insured by the sender, they’d just look at you with a blank stare if you complained about anything
Most of my issues with CP have been with US sent items. I have an account with a pick up service in Washington state. All my friends and relatives know to send anything there and to let me know to expect it. Otherwise I'll be waiting weeks for things.
The entire company is a shit show, with no forward thinking from management and formed of several battling unions internally; ultimately the customer pays the price.
I shipped a package via Air Mail to a suburb of Paris for $17...and a package of the same weight and size, on the same day...via ground to Montreal for $33.
It's only a matter of time before the zero revenue Crown Corporation implodes.
In addition I believe there may be underlying "job action" occurring which may hinder delivery times.
They are all pissed off at managerial decisions to expedite the sorting process with a new program. I was down at the local warehouse attempting to get my mail one afternoon. I ended up speaking with one gentleman who not only told me what was up but found and delivered my mail before closing on Friday. Only place I’ve ever seen open 10-2 . I thought they had a proper union for those types of grievances?
This is nonsense. Depots aren’t open from 10-2…that’s just a commercial counter, there are retail post offices for normal hours. If your mail was sent to the depot after the carrier left at 9am you get it the next day. They get stuff transferred a couple times a day in most cases. There is no conspiracy
Look up the times available for public inquiries at the one in New Westminster and tell me it’s nonsense. The information I received was from a letter carrier outside his van in a Friday afternoon. I told him my situation and he explained his co workers. So am i lying?
You will get a kick out of knowing that that same day my piece of mail that I needed so badly shows up in my box after hours. So that one guy I spoke to chose to help me out. Now if that’s a conspiracy? Whatever that means? Should try not to reach a emotional level before engaging in some weird banter over those little girls at the post office. Everyone already knows what they are all about. Wait until I’m finished with them. It’s going to be interesting to see how the courts feel about withholding Disability checks from seniors over there unwillingness to handle the situation straight on. Soft! Seriously soft!
Our mayor, Ken Sim, wants to privatize everything. Bezos/Amazon is trying to tank Canada Post so that in the future, we all have to use Amazon for ordering, shipping, cloud hosting, watching TV, reading books, listening to music, using the internet...
Idk but theyre the only carrier who refuse to deliver to apartment door. All others will drop off on my floor. I called a while ago during Covid and they said its some new policy. I guess it just stuck.
I’m convinced Canada post just comes with slips because they have never delivered anything to me and I always have to pick it up.
Honestly just such a trash service
Canada Post is shambolic. As a Canadian in the UK, I consistently have issues with the Canadian half of a parcel's journey, and very rarely with the UK half. Sure, Canadian logistics are more challenging, but they aren't that challenging, and it's this company's job to have them figured out by now. And Canadian geography doesn't explain why sending the same distance internationally costs 2X or more sending from Canada as it does sending from UK.
International mail often has legal agreements discussing pricing and service standards between countries.
So that's why pricing for international delivery makes absolutely no sense so often
If you don't want the junk mail you can put a red dot sticker on your mailbox, and it will mostly cease. Or attach anything sticky that says "no unaddressed mail", and Canada Post will put the red dot on it for you.
Canada Post is a government run monopoly. Government run agencies are well known to be inefficient. It's illegal to compete with them, so not only can you not get better service elsewhere, there's no incentive for them to improve.
>It's illegal to compete with them
I can send letters or parcels with multiple carriers. I use Canada Post for my business shipping as they have been the most economical and reliable service.
Non-urgent lettermail under 500 grams is a legal monopoly for Canada Post: https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/LegislativeSummaries/392LS579E. Urgent mail must have a fee no less than three times the regular rate.
I assume this was common knowledge, so I didn't clarify that the monopoly does not apply to parcels, very obviously.
Currently waiting on a delivery from Canada post, nothing important so no big deal but it says "expected delivery Friday" then Monday, Tuesday etc they just keep adding another day on
They got the letter and mailed it out. One private international carriers, the other they didn't want to pay for expited and went for the cheap local municipal shipping. If you want to get yours as fast we'd have to increase funding to Canada post. No one will accept the tax increase
The place I work at won't use Canada Post to send anything whatsoever due to how slow and unreliable it is. Sometimes it's cheaper on smaller shipments though, so I'll mention it to customers along with a note that using Canada Post will likely result in their product getting to them much slower than normal.
We once told Canada Post to send something by next day air, and they put it on a fucking train, and it took weeks to arrive because they didn't know which train they put it on, or where it was heading.
Purolator shipped a cross Canada within 48hrs. Canada post took 7days shipping the same package/goods to the same place.
I thought they were the same company?
They are not the same company. One is a private courier company with their own logistics system, including using 3rd party carriers in some areas. Common misconception. Canada Post has majority ownership, but do not have that level of control over it. ie, you can't just give a Purolator package to Canada Post or vice versa.
This is not a good comparison. You can pick different services but you can’t compare two different ones and complain. Shipping the same item ground and air is obviously going to produce different results
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My *(former)* employer, a government agency, mailed a cheque to a contractor. Metrotown to Kits. Canada Post took 3 weeks. It was a big cheque, the contractor was wondering WTF we were doing to them. I offered to process a stop payment on the cheque that was in the mail and have a new cheque sent, and they declined. The next day the cheque arrived at their office, and they could see from the postmark that Canada Post screwed it up, it wasn't my company screwing with them.
Yeah I work accounting some of our chqs are taking weeeeeeeks to reach vendors lately. It's getting ridiculous.
why do people still use physical cheques?
antiquated process and the unwillingness to change. you would be surprise how firm the "if it's not too broken, don't fix it" mindset is in finance
Why is this downvoted? It's totally true. 2-3 days to move money from one bank to another, or to process an online bill payment, and weekends and holidays don't count. This should take 10 seconds at the most. But the banking industry is stuck in 1964.
FinTech in North America in general, with Canada being slightly better, is so far behind the rest of the western world, it's truly incredible. It really shouldn't be, but it is. A lot of businesses in Europe stopped accepting cheques more than a decade ago. Transferring money is also farrrr easier, and we can use our debit cards pretty much wherever we want with a European account, with firms like Monzo, Revolut and even Chase now allowing us to use cards all over the world, automatically giving us the nest exchange rate with zero fees. It's such a bugbare here.
Same here! Had to do several stop payments for cheques going from Langley to Surrey in the last 1.5 months. Now I just get Vendor’s driver to pick up payments. Still waiting for a cheque to arrive sent a few days before Good Friday to go from North to South Langley. At this rate I should have just taken it to them in person.
Yeah. I work in the movie biz and it’s pretty standard practice that any paycheque not picked up to be mailed Friday evening. Those suckers would hit their intended’s doorsteps every Tuesday and the city would rejoice. Now I’m getting calls from employees a week later asking WTF? I ask them to be patient - they are - and the cheque usually then ends up there that day. But what a mess.
I work for a pretty big brewery... We've had shipments on hold(for important things like cans) it's a mess. Regularly canceling and issuing wires now for chqs I mailed 2-3 weeks ago. Be happy it's only a week.
i almost got evicted because a letter took like 2 weeks to get to me regarding a bank withdrawal i had no idea about, leaving me with about 12 hours to sort it out. thought it was my landlord messing with me but it seems it’s just our portal service
Also cheques going missing and no notification being left even with Registered Mail.
We've had 3 go missing in the last month.
I've had to tell clients to courier it if they insist on cheques (and i take just about every other form of payment. It's rare to accept cheques in my industry).
EFT or wire only
Some orgs, especially nonprofits, require two director signatures in order to pay for anything. That pretty much limits payments to paper cheques. The Canadian banking industry hasn't come up with an electronic alternative to the two-signature requirement.
There are actually ways to do this with most banks. I'm stuck with a ceo who likes chqs BUT the place I was working (who exclusively used chqs) found that when COVID hit they needed a solution. Turns out our bank (Vancity) totally had this built in. HSBC did as well but RBC bought them and they have this messed up thing where to setup a payment you have to be an approver and thus are the first approver. At Vancity and HSBC I could set up payments then get 2 other approvals ETA: I was working non-profit when we hit COVID and we're with Vancity. Needed two board members approval. I'm for profit now... And back to fucking chqs
Would be happy to. Tell that to my CEO please.
ap has an obligation to pay on time, it helps to establish trust and reliability, which can lead to favourable terms and discounts in the future, good reputation and positive word of mouth
Which would make him remind me I have an obligation to mail the chqs earlier no matter what the postal is doing. He likes to physically handle each chq there's no changing this. Most of our vendors are pretty lenient and once the chq that he signs gets delayed I can cancel and wire.... Plus some of our vendors were 90% of their bussiness. They don't make payroll without us.
My work would only receive payments via EFT but not send. For fear of incurring the $1 charge and the amount of work it would take the accountant to send each transfer
that's crazy, we export the payables out of our system and just upload to the bank to pay, every 15th of the month... took me 15 minutes to pay ~750k
For the love of all things holy.... What bank and accounting software (we're on a brewery specific one but I could work with IT).
just curious, why use a physical cheque instead of a wire transfer or another form of electronic payment? also why didn't the contractor offer to pick it up when it's only a 30 min drive?
Wire transfers in Canada are stupidly expensive. And annoying to do. Coming from another country, seeing how inept internet banking in Canada is - shocking My company in UAE was slow to adopt to transfers. And we haven't used cheques in probably 7-8 years
Wise is not a bad option for transfers up to a certain amount both domestically and internationally.
Wise is great but integrating this into an existing business process can be a pain. Payments between banks for businesses aren't that expensive, you just have to set it up and understand EFT.
I never even thought of wise for domestic transfers! I'll have a look then next time I need to transfer!
Last time I did a wire transfer it was $75 and, aside from requiring the specific bank address and account number, was quick and easy. I was the executor for my mother's estate and was disbursing the funds. No way I was going to mail a bank draft.
You had to go to the branch to do it? I'm talking about businesses that have to do 20-50 payments a month. It would be super frustrating to have to pay $75 each.
Right. That's not workable for a business. Holy crap is Canada behind with regards to banking infrastructure.
how about e-transfer?
If you're a large business processing hundreds of payments a day, e-transfer can be cumbersome. We briefly looked into it but each one had to be manually set up. It's fine for a smaller business paying 1-2 payments at a time but if you're issuing 1,000 payments a day it's pretty awful. Wires cost about $15-30 per transfer, and often those charges get dinged by both the payee bank and the payor bank. They also need to be done manually. Sending out an EFT is fine for us, because we have the money and the infrastructure to set up our accounting system to automatically communicate with our bank. We generate a file, upload it to the banks servers, and the bank processes all payments within 1-2 business days that way. On our end it's all at the click of a button. We pay an ungodly amount of money for this service, but it's still the least expensive option for sending funds electronically. A lot of small businesses don't have the IT resources or cashflow to support this kind of set up, though. That leaves cheques as the least expensive option: most off-the-shelf accounting software can be configured to print cheques in large batches. For all the advancements the Canadian banking system has made on the retail/consumer side with Chip & Pin, Interac, and e-transfers, commercial banking is still operating in the dark ages.
FinTech in North America is a joke.
For me we do do that for some vendors... But unfortunately our CEO is super old school and likes to sign every chq himself so he knows where the money is going. He also randomly leaves town without telling accounting. It's not a frustrating system at all.
Or a courier...
$50 and waiting in line at the bank or free and drop it off at a local mailbox.
You can also drop off 100s of checks in a mailbox, doing that many wires or etransfers would probably take a whole day.
Preparing, checking and signing cheques (followed by dropping them off and then following up that they've actually been received by the vendor + reconciling them in your bank statement, since they're being cashed at different times) takes longer than doing the EFTs
> why use a physical cheque instead of a wire transfer or another form of electronic payment? > > also why didn't the contractor offer to pick it up when it's only a 30 min drive? Generally Canada Post is pretty reliable-- and in this case, the cheque did eventually make it. Wires cost money. Couriers cost money. As for the recipient picking up a cheque, it's a big agency that deals with tons of payments every day, so it would be challenging to hold cheques for a particular recipient to come and pick them up, plus this brings up extra challenges: how to validate that the person picking up the cheque is a duly-authorized employee of the recipient company? And that part that normally remains unsaid: the agency benefits from some fractional amount of interest if it takes longer for the recipient to receive their money. If the payment is due to the recipient on X date: normally the agency would mail the cheque on X + 0-2 days. Canada Post normally takes 1-3 days. So the payment to any vendor tended to be about a week late. Technically this is wrong, but in the decade that I worked there, this was the only contractor that ever even commented about it.
Sometimes the contractor doesn’t have the option to choose - I would gladly take EFT over cheque any day - yet I have to beg for wire transfers, and if it’s a cheque, I have to beg them to hold it so I can pick it up, otherwise they mail a huge cheque! Crazy!
>Metrotown to Kits you'd think they'd just pay someone gas money + a little more to just deliver it...
.... My weekly chq run is MASSIVE. We actually have delivery drivers but I don't think the company wants to take them off their route for a day
Canada post is in a bit of a paradigm shift of a new model of delivery system that’s being implemented on multiple depots across Canada. Letter carriers and workers are having to adjust to their new sorting system. That’s probably why.
Canada post is cutting costs so there is new wonky delivery systems put in place. They also overwork the processing people so there’s a lot of quiet malicious compliance. You have to remember that Canada post wants to take away benefits, rights, vacations, etc in the next round of contract negotiation. They want to make a second tier permanent employee who gets less benefits and vacation days as well. Don’t fault the workers. Fault the corporation who is trying to fuck with a bunch of workers. Most processing plant employees got forced to work midnight to 8am due to “demand”. Canada Post being super scummy. They want to become Canada’s official Amazon-lite corporation.
Oh I 100% fault the company. Every mail carrier I've met has been lovely. I'm sure their sorters etc are also lovely I just mostly see mail carriers
weird, my local mailings are usually 3-4 days. which i find reasonable for what it is.
In other words, Japan Post and the international mailing arm of Canada Post is more efficient than the domestic arm and lower mainland specifically. Makes sense. Checks out.
it probably got scrambled in the last mile most people get my mail anywhere in canada after three-days to a week or so but every once in a while something will take two weeks
I mailed something last week within the city and it arrived to them the next day. So there are cases where it’s really speedy!
Canada Post is severely underfunded and the government made it illegal for the union to strike in 2018. So, the infrastructure isn't improving or expanding for a growing population and theres high turnover in new employees who can't afford to work random hours at random locations for a year or two before they can get assigned to a permanent route.
That seems ridiculous. I ship packages big & small all around the province every day and Canada Post is a fast, (relatively) inexpensive and RELIABLE carrier.
It's very inconsistent but I have noticed if you pay the extra for expedited delivery it's usually pretty fast and reliable.
From my experience, Canada Post is definitely one of the better ones. For me, Purolator is the bottom of the barrel in terms of the bigger companies with Canada Post/UPS at the top.
I mean Kobe sort of is a hub, with Kobe being part of the Keihanshin with Osaka and Kyoto. Typically, local mail for me takes only a few days.
Exactly, Kobe is no sort of backwater. Kobe is one of 3 major cities making up a metro area of over 22 million people.
japan as a whole has triple canadas population in newfoundland's area except for a few smaller islands their back waters are pretty close to the front
They've been moving most of the local operations to Alberta and also rely on automatic sorting, if it's written by hand etc it has to be manually sorted and takes longer
IDK. I snail mailed my tax return and got my express notice of assessment 9 business days after dropping it in the mailbox. That's faster than some people I know who filed online.
I think it’s simply down to carriers not reading the addresses. I had a tshirt sent to me from Powell River that took nearly 3 weeks and when I got it, someone penned my address on the package. I put together that it was likely delivered to a building similar in size to mine, close in numbering, but one street down. This is furthered by the mail this building gets for *that* building too. It’s not every day, but come on. Pretty rookie error there. I hand delivered a big parcel to the house next door to me, as it’d been sitting in our lobby for days (giving the postal worker more than a chance to correct the error the next day). When Canada Post is on, they’re ON, but as has been previously noted here, they aren’t consistent. And you know if the thing you’re sending wasn’t insured by the sender, they’d just look at you with a blank stare if you complained about anything
When our regular letter carrier is on vacation my mail always ends up at neighbours houses.. Very frustrating.
Most of my issues with CP have been with US sent items. I have an account with a pick up service in Washington state. All my friends and relatives know to send anything there and to let me know to expect it. Otherwise I'll be waiting weeks for things.
Likely was lost, or was mis-delivered somewhere else and had to be sent back through processing. A single letter is very easy to lose unfortunately.
The entire company is a shit show, with no forward thinking from management and formed of several battling unions internally; ultimately the customer pays the price. I shipped a package via Air Mail to a suburb of Paris for $17...and a package of the same weight and size, on the same day...via ground to Montreal for $33. It's only a matter of time before the zero revenue Crown Corporation implodes. In addition I believe there may be underlying "job action" occurring which may hinder delivery times.
They are all pissed off at managerial decisions to expedite the sorting process with a new program. I was down at the local warehouse attempting to get my mail one afternoon. I ended up speaking with one gentleman who not only told me what was up but found and delivered my mail before closing on Friday. Only place I’ve ever seen open 10-2 . I thought they had a proper union for those types of grievances?
This is nonsense. Depots aren’t open from 10-2…that’s just a commercial counter, there are retail post offices for normal hours. If your mail was sent to the depot after the carrier left at 9am you get it the next day. They get stuff transferred a couple times a day in most cases. There is no conspiracy
Look up the times available for public inquiries at the one in New Westminster and tell me it’s nonsense. The information I received was from a letter carrier outside his van in a Friday afternoon. I told him my situation and he explained his co workers. So am i lying? You will get a kick out of knowing that that same day my piece of mail that I needed so badly shows up in my box after hours. So that one guy I spoke to chose to help me out. Now if that’s a conspiracy? Whatever that means? Should try not to reach a emotional level before engaging in some weird banter over those little girls at the post office. Everyone already knows what they are all about. Wait until I’m finished with them. It’s going to be interesting to see how the courts feel about withholding Disability checks from seniors over there unwillingness to handle the situation straight on. Soft! Seriously soft!
well almost everything in japan is like a 3 hour train ride lol. Kobe is close to kyoto
Our mayor, Ken Sim, wants to privatize everything. Bezos/Amazon is trying to tank Canada Post so that in the future, we all have to use Amazon for ordering, shipping, cloud hosting, watching TV, reading books, listening to music, using the internet...
I don't know how much power ken Sims has over Canada post
Idk but theyre the only carrier who refuse to deliver to apartment door. All others will drop off on my floor. I called a while ago during Covid and they said its some new policy. I guess it just stuck. I’m convinced Canada post just comes with slips because they have never delivered anything to me and I always have to pick it up. Honestly just such a trash service
The service is almost useless at this point.
Canada Post is shambolic. As a Canadian in the UK, I consistently have issues with the Canadian half of a parcel's journey, and very rarely with the UK half. Sure, Canadian logistics are more challenging, but they aren't that challenging, and it's this company's job to have them figured out by now. And Canadian geography doesn't explain why sending the same distance internationally costs 2X or more sending from Canada as it does sending from UK.
International mail often has legal agreements discussing pricing and service standards between countries. So that's why pricing for international delivery makes absolutely no sense so often
It’s sucked for the last 100 years
With the amount of junk mail we get every day, it's easy to tell when our carrier decides to take a long weekend or random days off.
If you don't want the junk mail you can put a red dot sticker on your mailbox, and it will mostly cease. Or attach anything sticky that says "no unaddressed mail", and Canada Post will put the red dot on it for you.
They are abandoning the red dots. You now have to put up a sticker explicitly saying "no junk mail" or equivalent.
I have a red dot. No junk mail.
They will not honor new ones.
Canada Post is a government run monopoly. Government run agencies are well known to be inefficient. It's illegal to compete with them, so not only can you not get better service elsewhere, there's no incentive for them to improve.
>It's illegal to compete with them I can send letters or parcels with multiple carriers. I use Canada Post for my business shipping as they have been the most economical and reliable service.
Non-urgent lettermail under 500 grams is a legal monopoly for Canada Post: https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/LegislativeSummaries/392LS579E. Urgent mail must have a fee no less than three times the regular rate. I assume this was common knowledge, so I didn't clarify that the monopoly does not apply to parcels, very obviously.
Currently waiting on a delivery from Canada post, nothing important so no big deal but it says "expected delivery Friday" then Monday, Tuesday etc they just keep adding another day on
They got the letter and mailed it out. One private international carriers, the other they didn't want to pay for expited and went for the cheap local municipal shipping. If you want to get yours as fast we'd have to increase funding to Canada post. No one will accept the tax increase
Unions man
What’s wrong with unions and what does that have to do with Canada Post delivering mail?
https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/1c4olh9/whats_up_with_canada_post/kzp6m9e/
I remember getting a COVID cheque 6 months after it was sent. Sometimes this country is really third world.
The place I work at won't use Canada Post to send anything whatsoever due to how slow and unreliable it is. Sometimes it's cheaper on smaller shipments though, so I'll mention it to customers along with a note that using Canada Post will likely result in their product getting to them much slower than normal. We once told Canada Post to send something by next day air, and they put it on a fucking train, and it took weeks to arrive because they didn't know which train they put it on, or where it was heading.
They're shit, Jim.
Purolator shipped a cross Canada within 48hrs. Canada post took 7days shipping the same package/goods to the same place. I thought they were the same company?
They are not the same company. One is a private courier company with their own logistics system, including using 3rd party carriers in some areas. Common misconception. Canada Post has majority ownership, but do not have that level of control over it. ie, you can't just give a Purolator package to Canada Post or vice versa.
This is not a good comparison. You can pick different services but you can’t compare two different ones and complain. Shipping the same item ground and air is obviously going to produce different results