Canada

Efficient? Not at all. The Canada Post situation is like those public transit systems that pay for a bunch of empty buses to drive around. Except no one needs mail delivery 5 days a week in order to hold down a job, while at least the empty buses are available for people to get to work or school or to doctor’s appointments.

Canada Post drivers drive the same route every day whether they have 1 letter to deliver or 1000. The reason they started delivering so much junk mail is because they’d otherwise be driving around with a bunch of empty trucks.

Private couriers don’t always do this. They make new routes based on the packages they have to deliver each morning. This is far more efficient than driving the same route every day. The difference is that you don’t have regular, predictable routes for 9-5 drivers to work every day. But this is an area where you get more efficiency out of not having guaranteed jobs.

Other private couriers may instead have fixed daily routes but they’re not the ones Canada Post has. Stuff like business-only routes where a courier will visit all the dentist’s offices, optometrists, doctor’s offices in an area. Another one may serve all the lawyers and their business clients in an area. Or all the architects and engineering firms and construction companies.

Canada Post can’t compete with these couriers because they can’t hire a set of drivers for every possible combination of specialized routes. Plus they don’t have the specialized knowledge that these businesses need. Things like specialized pickup and delivery times that fit around their daily schedule.

A single, centralized solution is really a “one-size fits all” that ends up being far less efficient and far more restrictive. It struggles to compete with myriad smaller businesses because it lacks a way to build and preserve institutional knowledge and specialized experience. It also lacks any incentive to innovate due to a lack of competition.

If Canada Post were truly the most efficient solution then it wouldn’t need a government-enforced legal monopoly to protect it from competition for letter mail. The reason it’s been struggling is that letter mail is dying and only parcel mail (which isn’t protected by the monopoly law) is still growing.

That’s ultimately what this is about. I don’t think anyone on here would argue that we should still be running Morse code telegraph services for people to communicate. It’s obsolete technology that no one wants to use anymore. Letter mail is heading exactly the same way.

I think it’s fair that businesses should be made to pay the true cost of delivering letter mail, but that will ultimately accelerate the decline as businesses look to cut down the amount of mail they send, up to and including passing on the cost of postage to customers who won’t opt-in to paperless communications.