NZ Post, they sent me a letter

Sometime’s a letter’s a letter, and sometimes one can be a little weird. It turns out that even a weird letter can tell us something we never knew before. That’s what I found out this week.

This past Monday, I went out the letterbox to check the mail, something I do every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (that aren’t also public holidays). More often than not, my letterbox is empty when I check, though from time to time I get appeals for charitable donations (which I got that day) or some sort of advertising. Monday, I received a letter with a big label addressed “To The Occupier”, underneath a very a large bar code. At the top of the envelope, it said “Tracked Letter”. I thought it must be some sort of elaborate advertisement trying to get the curious recipient to open the envelope.

I like to think of myself as a curious person, whether I’m a recipient or not, so I opened the envelope. It was a letter on NZ Post stationery, beginning with, “Hi there,” which I thought was cheery, and nearly as friendly as the opening line: “We hope you're having a great day, and thanks for opening this NZ Post Tracked Letter.”

It turns out it’s part of NZ Post’s programme to send tracked letters to “random addresses all around New Zealand” to help them determine if they’re meeting their goal of delivering letters within three business days. I’ve seen NZ Post refer to that target many times, and I did kind of wonder how they measured their performance—how did they know if they met their target—but I didn’t wonder too much. It’s not like I don’t have plenty of more important things to worry about. Nevertheless, it turns out this is how they do that.

I suppose this is technically something I didn’t know I needed to know until I actually did know, but, at any rate, it answers the question I thought but never asked.

The letter also said this system let’s them test the quality as wells as the speed of their delivery, which makes sense. Doing this would help them identify choke-points in their systems, and that knowledge could help them further improve service.

Now that my un-asked question has been answered, I now have another: How will the decline in the volume of mail like letters affect their future targets? As delivery days decline further, will their 3-day target become a 4-day target? Or even a 5- or 6-day target? That’s a question for a future time, but it seems to me that monitoring the system as it is now will almost certainly help them plan for efficient delivery as the volume of letters continues to decline.

I was kind of amused by the final section of the letter, headlined, “What do I do with this letter now?” I mean, that’s not a question that I’d ask, which is kind of a good thing. Still, their advice is sound:

This letter has done its job now. There's nothing you need to do, but can we kindly suggest it's disposed of in a recycling bin.

Sometime’s a letter’s a little weird—and not just because of how rare letters are these days. I now know that sometimes a weird letter can tell us something we never knew before. In this case it answered a question I vaguely wondered about. Who’d have guessed a simple letter could be so intriguing and informative?

The title of this post is based on a line on a pop song called “The Letter”, a 1967 hit by US rock band The Box Tops. The song went to Number One on the USA’s Billboard “Hot 100” (…as well as 4 in Australia and Number One in Canada…) [LISTEN on YouTube]. The Box Tops’ version was the first I ever heard.