Going postal

Julie weighs in with her opinion of Canada Post's parcel rate scales.

I've always been a great fan of Canada Post.

I've been hooked on penpalling since the age of 10, and I currently have 150 penpals (give or take a few) around the world. Steve and I (and Gryffin, too) have also lived in 4 different regions of Canada, so we've got heaps of friends and relatives all over, with whom we keep in touch through the mail. Besides that, my grandmother was a postmistress in her town - so you could say that Canada Post is "in my blood."

The local Canada Post staff here in Hudson Bay is super-friendly and very accommodating when I do all my mass mailouts, and I can't say enough nice things about them and the excellent service they provide on a daily basis.

But something is definitely amiss in the parcel pricing structures of Canada Post these days. And I think that in his out-of-the-box thinking, Gryffin (pictured above) has the right attitude toward Canada Post's parcel services. Let me explain...

I send a lot of books around the world, as a member of bookmooch, a free book exchange website. Recently, I sent a book to another part of Saskatchewan, and one of similar size to Brazil. Guess which one cost more to send...unbelievably, the one going to Brazil, and by a substantial amount, too!

That didn't make sense, so I did a little research...and here's what I found out about the prices to mail a pocket novel of 400 pages, weighing 200 g or .44 pounds, from my house here in Hudson Bay,to several different destinations:

Mailed from my house in Hudson Bay, to:               Cost (including taxes)
My parents' house in New Brunswick, Canada              $13.67
The next town down the road from Hudson Bay             8.53
Anywhere in the USA                                                   5.44
Any other international destination                              6.44

It's actually cheaper to send the book outside of Canada, than to send it within our own country! And the price difference is significant, too...in fact, it is more than twice as expensive to send the book to my parents' house on the other side of Canada, than to send it to Australia, England or South Africa!

This seems ridiculous to me - how can it possibly make sense? There seems to be no correspondence at all between the distances & times travelled between the destinations, and their associated costs. Does Canada Post need new accountants? Or some maps?

All I know for sure is that I'm looking for more economical ways to send parcels. It makes me annoyed, but more sad than anything. I think that our stamps in Canada are some of the most creative and interesting in the entire world, and I hate to criticize my longtime friend, Canada Post. But their package deal has pushed the envelope just a little too far this time. They just might be receiving a Dear John letter sometime soon.