And way more expensive too

I have memories of ordering something express post from Japan for like $10 AUD and it would be at my door the next day.

Now if you order anything overseas it’s like $40 AUD if you want express and it still takes like a week.

For example, I (based in Australia) just sold something 5 days ago on eBay to the USA. The customer payed for express. It was $40 AUD. I also get a copy of the tracking and the tracking says it’s still in fucking Australia. It’s been five days there is no reason the customer shouldn’t have it by now and yet it hasn’t even left my state. Lmao what are we even paying for?

  • Spongebobsquarejuche [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    If Australia is anything like the US, then the postal service has had little investment in infrastructure over the last ten years. Even though mail order use has shot up.

    Here it’s the typical stop funding the post office so you can say it doesn’t work then eventually privatize it.

    I’m mostly get upset that they make so many stamps. I want so many of them. But I can write that many letters. And I write a lot. They’re making a Betty White stamp I had to promise myself not to get it

    • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      2 days ago

      The post is privately owned in Australia by a for profit company called AusPost. They are infamous for paying their CEOs massive bonuses while hiking up prices and hiring poorly paid contractors to deliver impossible targets.

  • JustSo [she/her, any]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    It’s beyond ridiculous. I dunno how it isn’t a constant ongoing scandal.

    Auspost has been gutted, the workers are on fucked contracts through parasitic outsourcing, it takes three different fucking people to deliver mail to my small town street and they all seem exhausted.

    It seems like a complete coin toss every time I order something, whether it will take a couple of days to arrive or get stuck at a sorting facility for weeks or even months.

    I’ve had things delivered that bounced around the country like a fucking pinball only to end right back at the first fucking post office the thing was sent from and then off it goes again. It’s absurd.

  • gila@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    Having had some experience working in logistics in that time, I’ve realised that there are a huge amount of potential factors. It doesn’t have as much to do with the origin/destination countries so much as where the origin/destination addresses are in relation to the respective points of entry/exit, as well as other circumstances that may be specific to that point of entry/exit.

    Online shopping now represents the majority of retail trade so this will have a general impact, planes are costlier to fly than they used to be and the scheduling has never really recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

    It also varies a lot by service. DHL for example flies their own planes, Mainfreight leases space on DHL flights (which DHL can decide to deprioritise at any time).

    Auspost was corporatised in 1989 and we are still experiencing new flow-on impacts from that, e.g they mostly just fill up empty space on passenger flights to save money. With that comes high variance of actual shipment capacity compared to what was planned, and it’s very normal for things to be delayed.

    If you’re a retailer sending high volume and it’s important that your goods are received quickly, the shipping companies will work closely with you to establish fast lanes (e.g NZ to Perth in 1-2 biz days). Often the retailer will often subsidise their shipping options to be competitive. But the list of shippers that can afford this (and do the volume where it’s warranted) is short.

    You could probably ring the company and find out more details about the lane you’re shipping on and strategies to reduce transit time, but if you’re not sending big volume it’ll most likely come down to shipping on a particular day of the week etc.

    All that said, I remember ordering US to Australia 10 years ago and paying out the ass for economy shipping, it would take an actual month and was completely untracked.

    Tl;dr it really just depends