Here is Australia Post’s latest retail catalogue. It strays further from the products and services permitted under the Act yet the politician don’t care. They don’t care that more than 850 government owned retail outlets take home and small business stationery sales from newsagents under the successful and respected Australia Post shingle.
This latest catalogue promotes: plush farm animals; USB sticks; copy paper; office stationery; Norton security and plenty of other items which have nothing to do with providing a postal service.
I am angered than the Federal Government has allowed Australia Post government owned stores to encroach deeply into newsagent territory unchecked and that the politicians who have presided over this don’t even have the guts to answer simple letters of complaint about the unfair competition. If it were their personal investment being eroded by a government enterprise I am certain their would be action.
Their excuse is that Australia Post needs to diversify to cover its costs. If that is the case why is this an Australian problem. We don’t see it in the US, Australia, France or the UK. Indeed in the EU even the postal service is about to become highly competitive. Here, Australia Post has protected foot traffic and they leverage that to take sales from newsagencies like mine.
Not only are they straying from the products and services permitted under the Act, they are doing this at the expense of providing a decent level of service for the very thing I thought Post Offices were there for.
In my local Post Office (LPO), you struggle through trash and trinkets to get to the counter which has been reduced in length to the bare minimum to conduct a transaction while the rest of the counter is loaded up with all sorts of merchandise sold by other retailers in the street e.g. giftware, postcards, $2 shop stuff, stationery, inkjet cartridges, lucky charms, etc.
The customer service is best described as “service with a sneer”.
It is galling to me that in the time we have been in the business, our stamp sales have increased five-fold because people refuse to go to the Post Office to buy them yet as soon as a glossy catalogue from Australia Post hits (often at prices higher than ours) we lose out on inkjet cartridges, paper and other stationery because of the perception that because the catalogue is from a well known organisation then the prices must be cheaper.