Here’s how Amazon is using its dominant market position to eat away at Canada Post:
Amazon requires online sellers to list their products on Amazon at whatever their lowest online price is (meaning, if I have my own website and I list on Amazon, I cannot charge more on Amazon or I will be breaking their Terms Of Service)
But! Amazon subsidises their shipping costs by charging the seller high fees. Sellers either have to not be on Amazon, or raise prices everywhere they sell online.
At Amazon’s warehouses and distribution centres, the working conditions are famously horrific, and when workers actually manage to form unions, Amazon simply shuts down those warehouses, as they did in Quebec. They’re similarly abusive toward delivery workers.
So, Amazon is not only squeezing sellers, they are also undermining working conditions and pay for all warehouse & delivery workers.
And Canada Post is being told by the govwrnment to “compete” against this with their hands tied by their service mandate:
I think pretty much everyone would agree that t’s a good thing that Canada Post has a mandate to deliver to every Canadian address, and that it does so equitably - e.g., letter mail costs the same amount of money to send across the country as it does to send across town.
(This is fantastic for our overall economy, and keeps the playing field level no matter where in Canada you are selling or buying products from.)
It’s a similar thing with the individual delivery routes themselves: delivering to a single apartment complex with 1000s of people in it is going to be way more efficient than driving all around a suburban neighbourhood, but Canada Post does not treat these things differently in terms of pricing.
(But, by the way, it’s still way more efficient for one delivery person to walk/drive to each door than to have every resident walk to a community post box!)
All of this means that some portion of deliveries are going to be profitable, and some portion are going to be unprofitable.
Guess which ones Amazon chooses to deliver to? And guess which ones it dumps on Canada Post?
That’s right - Amazon doesn’t have a mandate to deliver to all of Canada. So they skim off the profitable routes, and effectively have their operations subsidised with public money when they dump the unprofitable deliveries onto Canada Post.
That’s why we should make it so ALL last-mile deliveries must be done by Canada Post workers.
Here’s how Amazon is using its dominant market position to eat away at Canada Post:
Amazon requires online sellers to list their products on Amazon at whatever their lowest online price is (meaning, if I have my own website and I list on Amazon, I cannot charge more on Amazon or I will be breaking their Terms Of Service)
But! Amazon subsidises their shipping costs by charging the seller high fees. Sellers either have to not be on Amazon, or raise prices everywhere they sell online.
At Amazon’s warehouses and distribution centres, the working conditions are famously horrific, and when workers actually manage to form unions, Amazon simply shuts down those warehouses, as they did in Quebec. They’re similarly abusive toward delivery workers.
So, Amazon is not only squeezing sellers, they are also undermining working conditions and pay for all warehouse & delivery workers.
And Canada Post is being told by the govwrnment to “compete” against this with their hands tied by their service mandate:
I think pretty much everyone would agree that t’s a good thing that Canada Post has a mandate to deliver to every Canadian address, and that it does so equitably - e.g., letter mail costs the same amount of money to send across the country as it does to send across town.
(This is fantastic for our overall economy, and keeps the playing field level no matter where in Canada you are selling or buying products from.)
It’s a similar thing with the individual delivery routes themselves: delivering to a single apartment complex with 1000s of people in it is going to be way more efficient than driving all around a suburban neighbourhood, but Canada Post does not treat these things differently in terms of pricing.
(But, by the way, it’s still way more efficient for one delivery person to walk/drive to each door than to have every resident walk to a community post box!)
All of this means that some portion of deliveries are going to be profitable, and some portion are going to be unprofitable.
Guess which ones Amazon chooses to deliver to? And guess which ones it dumps on Canada Post?
That’s right - Amazon doesn’t have a mandate to deliver to all of Canada. So they skim off the profitable routes, and effectively have their operations subsidised with public money when they dump the unprofitable deliveries onto Canada Post.
That’s why we should make it so ALL last-mile deliveries must be done by Canada Post workers.