Is AU Post delaying domestic delivery of int'l mail?

July 21, 2020 11:22 AM

Small package of card + pix was sent to Melbourne nursing home resident in mid-April. No receipt. Assuming that package is in country and stuck for some reason. What would that be?
posted by John Borrowman to Grab Bag (13 answers total)

I have a feeling this is happening everywhere -- my husband sent cards/letters to his niece and nephew in Sweden back in April about a week apart, and they just arrived last week.

Here's info from the USPS about Australia in particular.
posted by jabes at 12:07 PM on July 21, 2020

I was chatting to a friend at NZ Post last week. USPS has shipments to our part of the world that have been stalled for literally months now. The pandemic has severely disrupted post. Passenger jets used to carry a surprising amount of freight and they're much fewer on many routes, meanwhile for the same reason demand for sea freight is high.

Unless tracking tells you otherwise I would not assume your parcel has left the US.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:35 PM on July 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

I am expecting a parcel from the US that has allegedly been stuck at Schiphol (Amsterdam) since 8th June. The vendor has now issued a refund. Hell knows if it’s really still en route in Holland or lost.
posted by koahiatamadl at 12:43 PM on July 21, 2020

As above. Airmail only flies when passengers do. You just have to be patient.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:00 PM on July 21, 2020

I similarly had this happen with packages from Europe to Canada - ordered in early April and neither arrived until well into mid-June. Canada Post (the national mail carrier) is working ridiculous hours to get through the backlog and volumes are (or at least were) higher than a typical Christmas season, so there is A LOT being sent around out there.

International has been significantly slower than domestic or even stuff coming from the US for us in Canada, so I think it's also partially that customs clearance processes are taking longer on each end of things because of physical distancing measures.
posted by urbanlenny at 2:03 PM on July 21, 2020

Oh yeah if you run a safe workspace in pandemic conditions that slows things up a lot. Not least because you'll be short-handed when you require symptomatic staff to isolate.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:08 PM on July 21, 2020

I send out a lot of international mail. Things are messed up at the moment. Some things I send out take weeks or even months longer than they usually would.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:26 PM on July 21, 2020

Best answer: I appreciate you're interested in the opposite direction but this link from the Australia Post website seems to suggest that some parcel traffic going to the USA from Australia is operating while the lowest cost tier is not operating at all. The reason I mention this is that I reckon if parcel traffic (albeit the two more expensive bands) is going Australia to USA it's perhaps reasonable to think that it is also going USA to Australia.

On the same page there's also a special mention of Melbourne but that's primarily relevant to their most recent flare up and so I don't think that would be significant to a package posted 12 weeks ago.
posted by southof40 at 3:38 PM on July 21, 2020

Travelling in a different direction, but to add to the anecdata: I sent a card (standard post, no tracking) from Melbourne to France in April. It still hasn’t arrived at its destination, and I’ve basically written it off as lost.

As others have mentioned, any mail involving air in Australia is slow at the moment - in large part due to significantly reduced commercial flight volumes, which means that mail cannot be loaded onto the cargo holds. Mail and parcels from Sydney to Melbourne are taking a week+ to arrive.
posted by goodnight at 8:03 PM on July 21, 2020

Another potential issue is that customs/quarantine into Australia can hold things up for an indefinite period for no particular reason.

Also, if for some reason it was undeliverable (address incorrect or unreadable, or just bad luck), it can take months to return. I gave the wrong address for a package from the US - it took 3 months to get back to the US after they tried to deliver it three times to an address that didn't exist. I think it went back by boat.
posted by kjs4 at 9:30 PM on July 21, 2020

More anecdata: a friend sent a package from Canada around July 3rd (that's the date she asked for my address; didn't look at the postmark for exact date) and it arrived in Australia on July 20th. (!!!)
posted by lulu68 at 10:43 PM on July 21, 2020

My anecdote: I had a package spend almost 2.5 months in Chicago recently. Once it left there I received it pretty quickly, but it was getting out of the US that took most of the travel time.
posted by eloeth-starr at 11:42 PM on July 21, 2020

Mail has been ultra-delayed here in Australia for a few months now. As Melbourne is currently in the throes of a second flare-up, and as nursing homes are one of the most at-risk locations, I suspect that Australia Post is holding onto it until it is "safe" to deliver.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:16 PM on July 22, 2020