La Poste is preparing to eliminate the daily rounds of postmen from March 2023. In several municipalities, mail will only be delivered every other day.
The postman’s daily rounds are over! La Poste wants to review its operation and is planning experiments from March to adapt its deliveries “as best [aux] developments in the field”, in particular the drastic drop in the number of letters sent in recent years. The French living in the 68 municipalities which will serve as guinea pigs will only receive their letters and other parcels every other day from March, reports France info this Friday, January 6, 2023. Only urgent mail will be an exception and will arrive daily in mailboxes.
Mail delivered every other day, why?
In different municipalities of the Pyrénées-Orientales and Atlantiques or other towns near Bordeaux or Amiens, postmen will alternate between two routes, every other day. A way to halve the efforts which should still be sufficient given the quantity of mail delivered, which is down sharply according to the deputy general manager of the services-mail-parcels branch within the company at La Poste questioned on France info : “In 2008 we delivered more than 18 billion letters, we will only deliver 7 billion in 2022”. Even the quantity of urgent mail, which includes parcels, the press or even registered mail, has been divided by 14 between 2008 and 2022.
If the first experiments will begin in March 2023, others will follow suit from June. To define the final details of the reorganization of La Poste and postman rounds, several meetings are organized at local level during the month of January.
The reorganization of La Poste displeases the unions
The announcement of the reorganization of La Poste and the abolition of the daily rounds of postmen has trouble getting through to some unions. “Users will no longer see their postmen daily”, deplores first Ludovic Jeanneau, South-PTT delegate at the microphone of France info this Friday, January 6. The trade unionist insists on the social function of the postman, sometimes the only human contact for the elderly and isolated, and fears that this link will be too affected by the reorganization of mail deliveries. But the main fear of the unions and the next elimination of depots, because in the long term it is the objective of the company according to them.