Australia Post is temporarily pausing collecting parcels from retailers in NSW, Victoria and ACT because of how overwhelmed the postal system is by Christmas-level volumes of online orders.
“Australia post currently has 500 people in necessary self-isolation, placing increased pressure on our network, while we also manage flight restrictions, temporary facility closures, and parcel volumes as high as our Christmas peak period,” Auspost said in a statement.
“Due to the ongoing impacts of Covid in NSW, ACT and Vic we are temporarily pausing Parcel Post collections for eCommerce retailers in those jurisdictions from 7am Saturday 4 September until 7am Tuesday 7 September, to help manage the record volumes in parts of our network and return them to a safe and manageable level.”
The temporary pause comes after complaints accusing posties of not delivering packages to people even though they are home, sending them to the post office instead as parcels build up in post offices.
https://twitter.com/AmyRemeikis/status/1432929951993384966?s=20
The good news is, the temporary pause on collections shouldn’t affect Express Post, and post offices will still be open for delivering and customer collections. Hopefully the break will ease the strain on posties and allow Australia Post to actually deliver our parcels and not tell us we ‘missed’ them when we are at home all day.
“Deliveries will continue across the weekend, post offices will remain open as usual, and parcel processing continues, as our people deliver record amounts of parcels to Australians,” Australia Post said.
“Similarly, services provided by Express Post, Premium, Startrack Express and letters remain unchanged across our network. Lodgements at Post Offices and Standard Post Boxes will also continue to be collected and collections in all other states remain the same.”
Editor’s note: This article originally said that customer collections by Australia Post have been temporarily paused, which was an error. Customer collections are resuming as normal, and we apologise for the mistake.
