The Moscow News. 500 tons of backlogged mail.

[valuestore]

http://themoscownews.com/russia/20130409/191426435/Postal-Service-cries-for-help-as-packages-pile-up.html

[pjcdn2005]

Wow, that's incredible!

[triber]

I am glad I blocked Russian a while ago after several bad experiences.

[femmefan1946]

Is that "tons" (imperial measure) or "tonnes" (metric)?

And did anyone do the division to figure out how many pieces of mail, allow for example, an average of 50 grams for each piece?

I'm dysnumeric so it's beyond me.

But I seem to remember a song by Nancy White that in passing mentioned that Gateway Terminal in Mississaugua handled 16 million pieces of mail every day. And since the song is on a cassette, that was 20 years ago.

Reporters are notoriously bad at arithmetic.

[kashka]

And ebay just announced it's .com site in Russia...lol...gonna be alot of "cases' opened there now....

 http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y13/m04/i09/s01

http://rbth.ru/business_news/2013/04/04/ebay_new_ebay_enhances_russian_version_launches_first_tv_ad_ca_24661.html

[reallynicestamps]

If my very bad arithmetic worked out right, that is about one million letters.

Less than Canadian postal workers handle in an hour.

[recped]

And did anyone do the division to figure out how many pieces of mail, allow for example, an average of 50 grams for each piece?

The backlog is with packages not letters so your 50 gram example is not a good one.

A 500 gram example might be better

Tonne or Ton doesn't really mater, if they were all 500 gram / 1 lb packages, then 2000 per ton or 1 Million packages. Sounds like a big number but it's not really in the general scheme of things, it's one package for every 140 residents of Russia.

Earlier news stories on this issue (from last year) stated the the biggest problem was that 40% of packages arriving in Russia had no customs declarations. These are probably not coming from North America but rather from within Europe. In any event packages without a customs declaration take MUCH longer to process than ones that do have a declaration.