I do stand in line to hand my parcels to the postal counter person. Leaving it on the counter and then sauntering off.... well, if the counter area and line up is that thick and busy, what is to stop another shopper from taking it like it was their own if the worker is too pressed for time to notice? I am cursed with the ability to immediately see a situation sideways for every possible way it can go wrong. (Ask me sometime about counting emergency exits in rooms.)
My stand-in-line-or-die-trying policy stems from a long line of events. I take an acceptance scan receipt now for everything. Even with tracked items, there are times where I have had to point to the fact it was dropped off at x hour on y day and what the heck happened to it, most recently with my Priority USA disaster right before Xmas that got chucked into lettermail instead of put into a special bag for FedEx by an irate drug store worker.
It used to be that I would just ask for an acceptance scan receipt on Small Packets Airmail so that I would have Proof of Mailing in case I had to make an insurance claim or reassure a buyer it was on-the-way. As I have said countless times before, I take all my parcels to the counter and get acceptance scans and as soon as I did that (Small Packets had bar codes eventually) and stopped leaving my items in a street letterbox, my incidents of Items Not Received dropped to less than one per cent. When I was first starting out as a seller on ebay, back in the day when Small Packets Airmail labels had only names and a printed number to signify the uniqueness of the label, my rates of Items Not Received were much higher than average: like between seven and ten per cent of packages mailed without tracking.
That was mid-2012. I was newer, my feedback count was in the 345 range and my product line was the same but two things were different: I would at least 50 per cent of the time leave the parcels in a letterbox, and there was no barcode on the Small Packets label.
Now, between then and now, two other things happened, but they are not what I would consider 'factors' more like 'items of interest'. One is that there were a pair of high-profile arrests in and around Manitoba where postal employees or CPC contract workers got busted for stealing mail and/or packages, and another is that I had a conversion one winter morning with a CPC truck driver doing the rounds who gave me specific instructions to take those parcels inside the store to the counter for scans. He said I should do it instead of leaving them in the street boxes. Whether he said so because he was tired of my boxes plugging up the collection boxes he was trying to empty, or if he was trying to warn me about something, I have no idea.
But, like I said, between taking every item inside and handing it to an agent and walking away with an acceptance scan receipt, and Small Packets (which I eventually dumped altogether for the security of Tracked Packets) gaining a bar code, the INRs mostly disappeared. My last two INR came around this time last year and I know with about 98 per cent certainly that they were false. But that is a story for another time.
-- but prices after the cover sheet appear to be the 2017 rates. Another Canada Post website screwup.
