I actually worked part-time as a mail carrier doing home delivery once. It's not easy work, especially in the winter. A lot of people don't maintain their driveways and walkways in the winter and it can be hazardous especially when you're carrying 15 kg or more of mail.
CMBs aren't high-security. But they're surely more secure than unlocked home mailboxes, especially in sleepy suburban neighbourhoods where no one is home for most of the day.
I don't disagree that Canada Post could likely save money in other ways. But this seems to be a rational place to start.
Imagine that UPS figured that delivering packages to your door is a real sucker's game, and they were in a monopoly industry where they could unilaterally make moves that competitors couldn't competitively undermine.
So they want to build big, onerous, eyesore structures everywhere throughout a neighborhood.
How much do you think it would cost them to do that? What do you think they will pay to rent the spaces, for instance?
Canada Post pays nothing. The federal government just forced it on municipalities. To make this even more built on imaginary economics, Canada Post forces developers to pay for Canada Post to install the superboxes ($200 per address).
One of those beautiful forms of downloading that of course end-users pay for, but somehow it saves the end user money.
In any case, Canada Post does not publish numbers for CMBs. They publish numbers for group mailboxes (how credible and all inclusive they are we certainly don't know), which includes a massive array of group deliveries, of which superboxes are a subset.
I actually worked part-time as a mail carrier doing home delivery once. It's not easy work, especially in the winter.
I'm not saying it is. But what is happening here is a battle between the union and Canada Post, and both are a part of the problem. One of the reasons home delivery has so many imaginary expenses is that it is a secret known country wide that doing home delivery is a dream job because you are paid for the route, but most carriers can complete the route in a small fraction of a work day, though it is assessed, over long battled union rules, as a full work day.
It's a battle of imaginary work and imaginary expenses, and in the end everyone loses.
http://www.dhl.de/de/paket/pakete-empfangen/packstation.html
The Deutsche Post DHL Packstations are tied into SMS notifications, and are an optional location you can have letters or parcels delivered to after you've registered for the service. They are located at places like supermarkets. I don't know for certain, but as a private company, I'm sure that DHL is covering the costs of the packstations and making it work from a business perspective.
Other package delivery services like Hermes take different approaches, using convenience stores, bookshops, and other small businesses in the area as package drop-off/pickup centres.
I always find it interesting how weirdly old-fashioned the discussion around mail service monopoly is in the US and Canada while 'socialist' Europe privatized the national postal systems years ago, and Deutsche Post fully lost their monopoly on letter delivery in 2008.
[1]: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeI...
You raise another good point that the cost of home delivery is inflated by the pay-by-distance union rules. But this issue is close to intractable. Given the political reality of this situation, do you think postal workers will give up these rules without a long, disruptive strike? Do you think the government wants to get within 10 miles of another postal strike?
Except now, it's not anywhere, it's somewhat adjacent to anywhere.
What the GP means is that Canada Post serves all areas of the country. If you try to send a package to a rural area via UPS, they'll charge you courier rates and then just mail it for you.
It's easy to understand why. It takes less time and effort to deliver to a group mailbox. (The mail has to be sorted regardless of which delivery method is used.)
It's not Canada Post's mandate to act as federally-paid community watchmen in the middle of the day.
If you think Canada Post is dysfunctional, just read some reports about the US Postal Service. In Canada, Canada Post outlets are often found within other businesses (e.g. pharmacies), to share infrastructure costs. That's rare in the US, where postal outlets are usually stand-alone.
As far as security is concerned, as someone who lives in a household where no one is around the take the mail in during the day, I'd much rather have something confidential delivered to my locked superbox down the street than have it delivered to an unlocked mailbox near my front door that anyone can access freely.
http://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2013/...
This mailbox proposal would put mailboxes in everyone's backyard.
Suspiciously door-to-door? Slap a newspaper bag over your shoulder like you're delivering fliers and go collect everyone's mail.
Quickly retrieve their mail? Most people are at work for hours before and after the mail is delivered.
I've lived in communities with both services. I prefer home delivery, because it's more convenient to me. But if you think it's easier to break into the super-boxes than it is to steal someone's home delivered mail, you're out of your mind. Luckily, community morals make either mostly a non-issue.
Rampant? 4800 issues reported in BC over a 5 year period[1], in a province with over 20,000 community mailboxes. Issues include non-theft things like graffiti and other vandalism. Haven't found more detailed info, would appreciate a link if you have one.
1: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/super-mailbox...
The level of audacity it takes to assault and rob a government employee, versus casually walking into someone's driveway and grabbing their mail are not even close.
I have people delivering fliers to my mailbox multiple times a week. It would take no effort for them to grab my mail and stick it in their sack.
But again, I don't think "the ease at which your mail can be stolen" should even be part of this argument, as it's apparently significantly low in most cases.
Admittedly one-to-many box is a more complicated device than a many-to-one, but the principal is still the same - it is perfectly possible to maintain such infrastructure, anyway.
Superboxes are significant structures that have to be built and maintained to withstand literally unending vandalism and attempts at theft. They are urban blight, and most quickly become an eyesore that are, by federally forced mandate, pushed onto a community and then maintained at Canada Post's leisure and low level of standards. If any other business wanted to build such ominous structures throughout a neighborhood the barriers and costs would be enormous, and you talk about home delivery being subsidized? [In that self-destructive, race-to-the-bottom, worst-outcome-for-all way that is so disheartening].
Give me a break.
Where a mail carrier once walked briskly through a neighborhood (doubling as a set of eyes and ears in the community, for what that's worth), now they park their truck and sit at the superbox for half an hour while they sort mail into boxes.
I cannot, for the life of me, comprehend how it has made anything more efficient. And of course the grossly inefficient Canada Post of today, with sky-high postal rates and terrible service standards, already is horribly inefficient, so shouldn't the superbox thing have been proven by now?
And it's curious that you note their security given that most have keys that endure for years (from owner to owner to owner), and they are -- right now -- very common target for thieves: Why bother suspiciously going door to door (where the residents would be more likely to quickly retrieve their mail anyways, instead of some common box down the street) when you can pry open a superbox and steal the mail of dozens of people at once.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/dailybrew/locked-canada-post-...
Canada Post has always been a derelict, massively dysfunctional corporation. Their parcel delivery service is only profitable because they don't deliver parcels: They give you a delivery notice and force you to drive to a depot n miles away in the most grotesquely inefficient delivery scheme devised by man.