Why is my parcel, mailed to me from Ontario, currently in Vancouver, while I'm in Montreal?

May 31, 2006 8:44 PM

Why would Canada Post want to ship a package (from Amazon.ca) bound for Montreal and originating in Mississauga, Ontario (about 350 miles from Montreal) via Richmond, British Columbia (about 3000 miles from Montreal)?

Yes, sending my item through a major Canada Post hub, even if it's out of the way, might make sense, but I have a hard time understanding how this detour is anything but wasteful. However, friends tell me that big detours (but usually not this big) are not uncommon in shipping. Why so? How is this worked out?

posted by Ricky_gr10 to shopping (16 comments total)

Flight logistics. If they already have 100,000 pieces of mail on a plane headed to Richmond from Mississauga that day, and none heading to Montreal, they aren't going to charter a plane just for your package, even though it is right there. The law of averages makes it economical: even though individual packages may get long detours, the average package gets there as efficiently as possible.
posted by evariste at 8:51 PM on May 31, 2006

My parents have worked for Canada Post for years. Evariste is right. And CPC has tons of logistics and business analysts working on these things all the time. It's not wasteful, even though it seems like it should be.
posted by acoutu at 8:55 PM on May 31, 2006

Living in the middle of the USA, I sometimes have packages destined for me that originated on one coast sojourning on the other coast before winding their way to me.
posted by evariste at 9:01 PM on May 31, 2006

This happened on a much smaller scale in Brighton, UK, where I was a university.

Letters posted from one person in Bognor Regis to another person in Bognor Regis, were delivered the following day stamped "Brighton Sorting Office" (Brighton is a good thirty miles away) and people protested the inefficiency of this.

They obviously believed that their local Post Office should sort mail as well as sell stamps, etc.

But maintaining a very small office, one of whose functions was to sort mail into local and not-local for about an hour a day, doesn't make sense compared to having an enormous sorting office working day and night sorting the whole region's mail.

This is just the same thing, on a larger scale.

They solved the problem in due course, just by changing the stamp on the letters to "East Sussex Sorting Office". Nobody complained any more.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 9:28 PM on May 31, 2006

If you Fedex overnight in the US from pretty much anywhere to pretty much anywhere else, it goes through Nashville, where Fedex has a huge sorting center. (Seattle to San Francisco goes through Nashville.)

Every night about 1:00 AM, jets fly into Nashville from all over the US and unload their stuff at the sorting center where everyone really humps for a couple of hours sorting it all. Two hours later, loaded back up, those jets head right back where they came from. So the package from Seattle rides the Seattle-to-Nashville jet, gets sorted, and then rides the Nashville-to-San-Francisco jet, and gets delivered the next morning. And that means Fedex only needs one big sorting center rather than a dozen redundant ones -- and it needs a lot fewer jets.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:24 PM on May 31, 2006

memphis, not nashville. big fedex hubs also in indianapolis and anchorage. (used to offload planes at IND)
posted by sergeant sandwich at 11:54 PM on May 31, 2006

What everyone else said. There's a sub-field within operations research devoted to the algorithms of efficient distribution and delivery. After a dose of complicated math it turns out that, above a certain large number of things to be moved about between a large number of different locations, it's a lot more efficient to have one big and busy hub location that everything passes through, rather than small distribution centers all over the country.
posted by normy at 12:39 AM on June 1, 2006

ditto the other comments. Australia Post works similarly, with enormous mail centres acting as processing hubs for the major cities. Everything goes through them, even if it is just going to end up one street from where it began. Part of the advantage is that you can set up sophisticated multi-quintillion-dollar sorting machines (with barcode scanning, optical character reading abilities etc) in these centralised locations. The processing speed & economies of scale more than make up for the extra miles travelled, you can do away with local sorters, and your IT systems are less distributed, easier to manage, and involve far less hardware. Overall, it's a bit like using a superhighway to get between cities, instead of hopping from town to town via the backroads.
posted by UbuRoivas at 1:02 AM on June 1, 2006

US Post offices used to have 2 slots for mail: Local, and Out-of-Town. No one had to sort that mail, it was sender-sorted. Of course this doesn't work in random drop boxes.
posted by Goofyy at 1:36 AM on June 1, 2006

US Post offices used to have 2 slots for mail: Local, and Out-of-Town. No one had to sort that mail, it was sender-sorted. Of course this doesn't work in random drop boxes.

We have similar mail boxes here in Ireland, but it doesn't really make any difference since. 9 times out of 1.0 the mail collection throws them all into a single sack.

On the seemingly-weird logistics front, whenever I order something from Amazon.co.uk it usually travels via Frankfurt, which is hundreds of miles in the entirely opposite direction.
posted by macdara at 5:30 AM on June 1, 2006

Great replies, and from many perspectives! I feel like I've been living in a bubble. Thanks!
posted by Ricky_gr10 at 6:41 AM on June 1, 2006

US Post offices used to have 2 slots for mail: Local, and Out-of-Town

They still do where I live.
posted by languagehat at 6:50 AM on June 1, 2006

It's probably a processing hub thing, but it could also have been a simple sorting mistake.
posted by graventy at 7:19 AM on June 1, 2006

This says:

Orders placed at Amazon.ca are fulfilled and shipped from within Canada by Assured Logistics, a part of the Canada Post Group of Companies.

Probably some BS with Assured Logistics having a postmark and return stamp in Richmand, BC that says "Amazon.com, Mississauga, Ontario" even though the packages are actually shipped from Richmond.
posted by mattbucher at 8:05 AM on June 1, 2006

This is tangential, but here's a radar video of a mass of FedEx planes coming into Memphis during a thunderstorm. It's amazing how they orchestrate it all.
posted by zsazsa at 8:30 AM on June 1, 2006

Note also that when you look at the tracking info, you may see the activity "Shipping details electronically submitted" with a location of Mississauga, Ontario. This has nothing to do with the location of the parcel. It just means that the person shipping the parcel paid the postage using some sort of electronic postage meter type of software and the server at Canada Post which received the information about the parcel happens to be located in Mississauga.
posted by winston at 8:58 AM on June 1, 2006