CP to post $billion loss

[tobyshitzu]

Canada Post operating loss to hit $1 billion by 2020

http://www.thestar.com/business/2013/04/23/canada_post_faces_1b_annual_operating_loss_by_2020.html

[treasure.hunter.d]

I mentioned before that my old mail carrier did his route of about7-10 blocks roughly with a wheelie cart and that the new guy has a van. I asked the new guy about this and his explanation was that the regular mail carriers are now delivering packages and require the van for that. So I thought well then, there must be some savings here because all of those former truck drivers that were delivering packages must have gotten laid off because they were no longer needed.So I asked about that as well and to my surprise none of those guys were laid off, All those guys were moved into "NEW" positions.In non-union speak that means that CP basically created BS jobs that have basically nothing to do but still pull in a huge paycheck just to keep those wankers employed.

With crap like this going on regularly is it any wonder that we pay such grossly inflated rates.

[femmefan1946]

Tom- twice in this thread you have made statements about privatization then when others showed that your statements were wrong, you claimed that was not what you meant.

If you want to claim that Deutsche Poste is cheaper than Canada Post because it has been privatized, then it is valid for others to show that their rates are not cheaper even though they are working with a larger population in a smaller area.

And if your claim is that rates did not rise when the German PO was privatized, because they were already lower , then I am baffled about what you think you are proving.

And again, Canada Post competes directly with courier companies, so comparisons with them are at least as valid as comparing the costs of shipping by truck and by train. The names (machines) may be different, but the function is comparable.

dipmicro - privatizing the PO would not help those in rural, isolated or northern communities.

Canada Post is mandated to provide delivery to those communities. Couriers are not, and in fact, couriers will subcontract delivery to those communities to Canada Post. It would be both politically and legally necessary to keep those (expensive ) services in public hands, without the current subsidy they get from southern postal users.

[art-in-the-making]

dipmicro it is true that Canada has a lot of sparsely populated areas, although having lived in some of these places, I can assure you there are people living all over the country, not just along the U.S. border.

The  "population distribution" is a factor but I don't think you get the scale of distance involved in the conversation.

You could go right across Germany at the farthest points and you wouldn't even get from Vancouver to Calgary. Or, to take the comparison a step further, all of Germany would fit into the southern third of B.C. One of the longest trips between major cities in Germany is Munich to Hamburg, 776 km. Vancouver to Calgary is almost double as far.

So you can deliver all the mail in Germany without even getting out of Canada's 3rd-largest province.  And without putting one envelope on an aircraft.

In terms of population distribution, vast amounts of Germany's population are further concentrated into tiny areas like the Ruhr where you would literally be within an hours drive of tens of millions of people.

dipmicro, I think the more you would look into this - the more you would find that Germany should be delivering mail way more inexpensively than Canada.

[dipmicro]

art, I don't want to get into the Germany/Canada argument, I know very little of German post, in my opinion it must suck because of ratio of my German mail allegedly lost. My point was to end the misconceptions.

privatizing the PO would not help those in rural, isolated or northern communities

femmefan, I actually suggested socializing of PO in my earlier posts. Anyway, when you are running agency like PO, you should satisfy 99% first and the 1% last. I think people in rural areas have good mail service considering their circumstances, it's the urban areas where is inadequate and overpriced.

Examples:

USPS recently started pre-sorting mail in local post offices, so local mail does not go to sorting centers and delivery time for local mail is 1 day. Obviously, this would be good for urban areas, because rural communities have almost no local mail. There is no point sending admail when you can shout "Folks, we got fresh fish, you want some?" and everyone hears you.

I don't care much what happens to CanadaPost. Parliament or market or both will sort them out. I grew up elsewhere, so have no nostalgia. Privatize it, cancel it, for me it's going to be Tuesday.

[toff3]

Femme,

Firstly, never once have I claimed that overall German postal rates are lower than Canada's.

All I said was, in contradiction to Art-in-the-making's statement, postal rates in Germany went down after Deutsche Post was privatized in the late 1990s. For 12 years or so after that there was no increase to the rates. Prior to privatization, Deutsche Post rates, both domestic and international, were high and, for all I know, some of them may still be high.

You cannot compare German domestic  postal rates with those of Canada, for obvious reasons, reasons that have been flogged to death by numerous contributors to this thread (geography, population density, etc.). It's a case of apples and oranges.

However, I believe a valid question to ask is, why is the postage on a regular letter from Germany to Canada half that on the same letter from Canada to Germany? It seems to me a case of apples and apples.

Secondly, again for the umpteenth time, I would point out that privatizing the post office does NOT mean turning it into a courier company. A fully privatized postal system would use the existing postal infrastructure and conform to regulations agreed on by the Universal Postal Union. Art keeps harping on about how cheaply Deutsche Post (wholly owned by DHL) sends a Small Packet by mail to Canada and how much it costs to send that parcel back to Germany by DHL operating as a courier. It's apples and oranges.

Tom 

[pjcdn2005]

However, I believe a valid question to ask is, why is the postage on a regular letter from Germany to Canada half that on the same letter from Canada to Germany? It seems to me a case of apples and apples.

Not really. Even if sending a letter to Germany and vice versa costs their respective post offices the exact same amount in labour etc, that does not mean that they would charge the same because businesses does not always have the same margins for each product.

For example, I ran a couple of restaurants for years.We sold more cups of coffee than any other single item. Plus, our margins were higher on coffee than any other item. That meant that if wanted to make more profit we could simply raise the price of coffee by a small amount and not have to do a price increase on our other items. Basically, the coffee and other less expensive items subsidized the more expensive ones.

Perhaps DHL maximizes their profits by charging a premium for domestic lettermail and in turn, subsidizing the international lettermail. Canada does not have the same volume of domestic lettermail so they might not do things the same way.

[art-in-the-making]

All I said was, in contradiction to Art-in-the-making's statement, postal rates in Germany went down after Deutsche Post was privatized in the late 1990s.

I have never said that. IMO what happened (to DP in relation to itself) before/after//during DP being privatized is irrelevant.

DP was bought, absorbed or somehow conglobulated by DHL. This transaction will never be duplicated nor approximated in any way. How could it ever be? As familiar as those reading the thread must be getting with some of the logistical differences between Canada and Germany, we haven't even begun (nor will we) to scratch the surface of the details of this multi tentacled deal between two mutant octopi of totally unique character.

The only thing we can really go by is what kind of value DHL is providing to its customers. And I don't think anyone would say it is a blazing success in comparison to Canada Post.

[toff3]

PJ,

I admit I have little idea of how Deutsche Post arrives at such a cheap rate (relative to Canada Post's) for a regular letter overseas. But I have a suspicious mind - particularly when it comes to Canada Post - and consider CP's international postal rates to be outrageously high and not justifiable. If I can be proved wrong, I'll happily retire from this thread.

But I believe you're missing an important point. If CP had a fair pricing system, the base letter rate would apply to letters weighing up to 20 g and this rate would be lower than for letters weighing more. Then the discrepancy between CP's and Deutsche Post's rate would not be so large.

Art,

For the last time...in post #15 you stated

Another fact readily acknowledged by the "privatization" champions is that there is no way that privatization would ever result in lower prices

and in post #17 you implied the same.

This statement is false and I have proved it.

Any further discussion of Deutsche Post/DHL is irrelevant except insofar as to what we can learn from them that might help to save Canada's postal system from drowning in a sea of red ink.

Tom