Here we go again. Another rant for the Bullshit corner..

Australia Post has been receiving some serious complains lately and for a good reason I may add.. You can check the various social media and you can read the hundreds of people that truly are pissed off with Australia Post handling of the Covid-19..

Truth is, the Covid-19 only exacerbate what was already there.. A company run by an idiot on limp mode.. Due to my geographic location, I have been using Australia post for the past 20 years, and in all honestly they have always delivered my parcels around the world and never lost a single one. Unfortunately this is where the good news does end.

Prices have always been out of touch in comparison to other courier and other countries, to the point that several times I had customer cancelling orders at the checkout, once they got to see the delivery cost. I use a system that just copy and paste Australia Post delivery cost published on their website. Here is the first problem. Even by following their spreadsheet delivery cost, I have been constantly loosing money on delivery, a dollar here five dollars there, but always ended up charged the customer less. Why? Two reason!

  1. I’m an honest business operator
  2. Because of the above, I refuse to rip off my customer by charging them for the air inside and around the box..

Australia Post however, has no problem in charging me for the air inside and around the box, by using what in the industry is called the Cubic Weight, but only if it is more profitable, otherwise standard weight applies.. This alone tells you how much they really care about us!

Either way is bad news for anyone in this country trying to run an honest business. In plain English, I can buy a 1kg from the US and get it here for as little as $2.99 USD (thanks to USPS common routes deliveries) or I can send a 1kg package from Brisbane to Burpengary for $28.00 thanks to the Cubic weight idea.. Or I could send the 1kg parcel back to the USA (the one they sent me for $2.99) for $62.70 with tracking. Oh yeah, at Australia Post, we proudly charge extra for tracking, extra for signature, or extra for the air in and around the box, just because we can!!!

The icing on the cake came back in April when we were told that because there were no flights, to help the situation we were only allowed to send using Express service (a lot more expensive for what ended up to be the same result). So we did. We paid extra just to find out by accident than towards the end of May (the 28th precisely) Australia Post has a new web page where they apologise for the delay.

Never told anyone or even just sent an email to let us know how bad it really was. You would have find out about this page only after receiving abusive calls from your customers asking what was going on, after nearly 40 days. Now they have update the date (they are not stupid after all) and improved the look of the page, including that handsome fella that for some reasons unknown to me, is actually smiling in a middle of a pandemic.. It looks he’s saying “Yeah I got your money..”

Well think about for a second. If there are no commercial flight (used by Australia Post) going in or out of Australia, it doesn’t really matter if your parcel is red, yellow or made of gold. It simply won’t go anywhere. This is where Australia Post went very dishonest towards their customers! Instead of stopping taking our money plus the extra charge for the express, and simply told us to find alternative arrangement (like DHL for example or any other courier company that has their own planes), because unable to provide the service we paid for, and in doing this breaking the law, they simply just kept taking parcels and started to pile them up in their different depot for nearly three months hoping that no one will notice and that the problem would just go away. What a very mature way of handling the situation..

I’m glad that was not up to Australia Post to deliver in time face masks or hospital equipment, otherwise it would have been a carnage!

If you went to the post office and ask why you tracking number says that the express parcel was still in Australia after 30 day you sent it, you were told that was because of Covid-19. Same answer for parcels sent on economy back in February! If you asked for your money back or simply your parcel back, you were getting simply a smile back. Meanwhile, we took all the abuse, and had to apologise to our customers for Australia Post incapacity of telling the truth and the usual “politician way” of handling the situation..

I guess it doesn’t matter what the problem is, when your business is run by greed and dishonesty, the result will be always the same. Ugly!

Then I got pushed again into the joke arena by another Australian company that try to sell items on eBay when they have no stock. That’s always very annoying because they simply shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Again, the vendor did blame the new computer system just installed for me not receiving the email 9 days after the purchase date, to let me know that they had no stock. So you start to wonder why we complain so much about the Chinese sellers (they are the champ apparently at this game on eBay), when we Australian are doing the same game to our own kind?? So I decide to check this eBay online shop a bit deeper and it didn’t take long to find the other usual discrepancies:

 

This is the business eBay page and if you scroll down a bit we start to see the problems..

 

So this water pump was $89.95 and now is $71.50 plus $7.00 delivery.. Or is it? If you scroll down the page just a bit more, the same item does appear again..

It no longer was $89.95 but simply $82.50 with now the famous (free delivery), that actually cost $4 more than paying for the delivery!!

Then it gets even worse when the same item is listed just next to each other..

At least this time the “free delivery” cost us a dollar less than the actual delivery cost. The “Was” price is clearly made up and a very common practice even by much bigger business. No one really care what the price “Was” but we are stupid enough to believe that we are getting a better deal. What they should write instead is RRP that no one really care, or “Was Never” as it would be the most honest statement in their page..

Reason why I put this in the same article is because in this instance, the company did give me the tracking number but had no stock. So by the time I received it, it would look like Australia Post took 20 days to deliver from Melbourne, but it is definitely not the case.. But if you put the two issues together, you can see why Australian people are getting fed up with this kind of dishonesty…

Now in saying all this I would like to finish this article in mentioning that regardless of the fake free delivery listed by this business, his price are actually still quite good compare to the rest, and the delivery cost is very reasonable. That was the main reason why I didn’t give him a bad review on eBay.. I know, I’m cheap.. 😂

Later..