Vexed Bermoothes

The Bermuda Post Office has been going through an exercise to get householders to properly install mailboxes and use correct addresses.  This, in itself, is entirely logical and needed to be done.

However, the project has ended up being controversial as the Post Office has “returned to sender” large volumes of mail with minor inaccuracies in the address – even if there was ample information to make the delivery.

It didn’t need to be this way.  The Post Office did make lots of public announcements.  (With twisted humour, many noted that the post cards sent out by the Post Office to encourage householders to use correct addresses featured an image of a “properly addressed letter” … with an incorrect address on it).   But they should also have taken the time to rubber stamp improperly addressed letters for a period of time to prompt recipients to get their addresses corrected.

But instead a lot of goodwill has evaporated – and some local business “bulk mailers” seem to be upping their game in online delivery of bills and statements.  This will result in a decline in use of the Post, which has already seen revenues drop due to the use of email and private couriers.

Now, people have been complaining about the unpredictability of the local mail for years.  The use of correct addresses will help that.  But we are still missing a degree of accountability.

In many countries the Post Office sets standards for delivery of mail – and performance against those standards is made public.  For example here are the US Postal Service delivery  standards as well as recent reports on their performance.

I call on Government to commission an occasional “performance audit” of the Bermuda Post Office.  This is something that the media …. or Bermuda students in statistics or accounting … could also take on.

Here’s how it could work:

• You create a large quantity of anonymous letters (each of which contains a tracking number inside).
• You mail them from various points around the island (including Post Offices and drop boxes), addressed to an array of mailboxes, as well as residential and business addresses.
• By location, you track the date of mailing and receipt.
• The idea is to “matrix” all the possible postal code zones, with multiple letters for each option posted on different days, to calculate an average transit time.

I don’t propose this with any hostility:  I like the postal staff in my area and am treated well by them.  But the Post Office is a logistics business … and the only way to improve a logistical business is to pinpoint where lags are occurring.

A parting thought:  it will be interesting to see, in this period of Government cutbacks, if Dr. Brown does his mass mail-out of Christmas cards this year … and how many of them will be delivered with inaccurate addresses!