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If Australia is anything like the US, then the postal service has had little investment in infrastructure over the last ten years. Even though mail order use has shot up.
Here it's the typical stop funding the post office so you can say it doesn't work then eventually privatize it.
I'm mostly get upset that they make so many stamps. I want so many of them. But I can write that many letters. And I write a lot. They're making a Betty White stamp I had to promise myself not to get it
The post is privately owned in Australia by a for profit company called AusPost. They are infamous for paying their CEOs massive bonuses while hiking up prices and hiring poorly paid contractors to deliver impossible targets.
Oh so you're already living the dream.
Often feels like we're a testing ground for a random selection of the worst neolib strategies. Friends around the commonwealth echo this sentiment.
We used to have a real postal service run by the government. It used to be good secure work. It erodes in front of our eyes.
I have noticed this too. I keep telling Americans, if you want to know what's coming next, take a look at what Australian and UK media is saying.
Corbyn was the testing ground for the Bernie ratfucking.
"Don't let the cure be worse than the disease" was said by Scomo before it was said by Biden. So was "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good."
Yeah the UK is fucking heartbreaking, I have a lot of family over there and the way the NHS has been gutted is literally killing people I love. Oh well dying empire go brr.
It is very heartbreaking and it's happening to Australian Medicare too.
Yup. We can only hope Xi will be merciful when he finally liberates our younger generations.
It's a good government job here in the states. Somewhat lower paying but you get benefits and retirement. So naturally the pot full of crabs that is the US wants to hand it over to capital so those lazy freeloaders can suffer like the rest of us. :)
Sounds too efficient and normal, they should really look into that.
It's beyond ridiculous. I dunno how it isn't a constant ongoing scandal.
Auspost has been gutted, the workers are on fucked contracts through parasitic outsourcing, it takes three different fucking people to deliver mail to my small town street and they all seem exhausted.
It seems like a complete coin toss every time I order something, whether it will take a couple of days to arrive or get stuck at a sorting facility for weeks or even months.
I've had things delivered that bounced around the country like a fucking pinball only to end right back at the first fucking post office the thing was sent from and then off it goes again. It's absurd.
Did I ever tell you about the one time a parcel tracking showed the parcel was one Street over and then the next day it was sent to a state on the opposite side of the country?
I would go postal. I just don't know where to direct the fury lol.
Have a horrorcore rap song about the fucking mail. (CW: horrorcore rap / talkin bout killing the mailman, basically anti-worker reactionary shit)
https://open.spotify.com/track/30GTI6sTGv09BTPihgzjBu | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpH6DZ9vdx8
edit: of course, we do not blame the workers doing the fucking work. System's fucked.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Having had some experience working in logistics in that time, I've realised that there are a huge amount of potential factors. It doesn't have as much to do with the origin/destination countries so much as where the origin/destination addresses are in relation to the respective points of entry/exit, as well as other circumstances that may be specific to that point of entry/exit.
Online shopping now represents the majority of retail trade so this will have a general impact, planes are costlier to fly than they used to be and the scheduling has never really recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
It also varies a lot by service. DHL for example flies their own planes, Mainfreight leases space on DHL flights (which DHL can decide to deprioritise at any time).
Auspost was corporatised in 1989 and we are still experiencing new flow-on impacts from that, e.g they mostly just fill up empty space on passenger flights to save money. With that comes high variance of actual shipment capacity compared to what was planned, and it's very normal for things to be delayed.
If you're a retailer sending high volume and it's important that your goods are received quickly, the shipping companies will work closely with you to establish fast lanes (e.g NZ to Perth in 1-2 biz days). Often the retailer will often subsidise their shipping options to be competitive. But the list of shippers that can afford this (and do the volume where it's warranted) is short.
You could probably ring the company and find out more details about the lane you're shipping on and strategies to reduce transit time, but if you're not sending big volume it'll most likely come down to shipping on a particular day of the week etc.
All that said, I remember ordering US to Australia 10 years ago and paying out the ass for economy shipping, it would take an actual month and was completely untracked.
Tl;dr it really just depends