Mail Delivery

I am used to a certain level of service from my post office. The US Postal Service is the biggest single business entity in the world, delivers more mail more accurately than any other postal service, and it works more days per year than any other postal service. My wife and I frequently put letters in the mail in Calais, ME and they arrive in Southern California within, on average, three days.

Now I'm living in Canada. I have suspected that the Canadian postal service is not as great as America's before, but recent events have really brought it to focus. Twice in the last six weeks my pay check has been sent from a company in "uptown" ("downtown" to most Americans) and it has taken one letter nine business days (13 days total) before it arrived and another, the one I'm currently waiting on, is at 10 business days (15 days total) and I still haven't received it as of yesterday's mail delivery.

My wife and I have a Zip.ca subscription. The vast majority of those movies are between 1-3 days later than the estimate, and I am convinced it happens when they reach this city. One of my brothers in law tells of receiving a package from Japan in four business days, while a letter he sent to someone else in this city took seven business days. We get a lot of mail, junk mail, and fliers, yet our mail box can be suspiciously absent for days at a time.

In America, the post office has their motto that, basically, says they deliver the mail no matter what. Even though this area of Canada is well-known for snow and bitterly cold days in winter, our mail carrier doesn't deliver on those days. Doesn't matter if it is important or you're waiting on something you might need desperately, like a pay check, it is too cold, wet, dark, snowy, foggy for people who, for the most part, have been born and raised in this weather and well know how to cope with it safely to go out to deliver something as unimportant as the mail.

I guess it is a good thing we rely primarily on my wife's electronically deposited pay check for things like bills, as Canada Post simply doesn't think my pay check taking approximately two weeks to go from one location within the city to another location within the city is a problem. And, I'm sure, if we relied on that pay check for our mortgage, our mortgage lender would be just as forgiving and understanding when we told them we're waiting on the check to arrive. Yeah, right.

I found the online email complaint services for Canada Post and have made a complaint to them about this. I received a fairly generic reply back that completely missed the point, so have informed them again of the inadequacies of the mail delivery service in this town. Probably means that we won't receive mail for at least a week as they mark us as a problem delivery location, but when something you can prove is clearly going wrong, you have to complain. And if more people did that, change would occur.

Addendum
After my last email to them, reiterating the problem and suggesting they need to look into the issue further and see if it is the mail carrier or something wrong with the processes in the main postal annex, I got this response:

Hello,
Thank you for your message to Canada Post.
I can certainly appreciate your concern and would like to apologize for the inconvenience caused.
I have opened an inquiry, which will be sent to the local depot that is responsible for delivering the mail so that they can look into this concern and resolve any discrepancies. Your customer number is ######## and your case number for this inquiry is #######.
 
The depot does not normally follow up with the customer for these types of issues unless they require additional information. Please allow 5 business days for resolution and if you do not see any improvement, please contact us again.