Australia Post Is Going To Start Charging You Rent For Unclaimed Parcels

If you don’t pick up your Australia Post parcel deliveries after five days, you might be on the hook for an extra $9 fee. That’ll be another sting for the 8 per cent of AusPost’s customers that are a bit tardy with their post office visits, and it’ll net the mail carrier even more money to prop up the struggling letter delivery business.

Online shopping image via Shutterstock

Business Insider reports that as of August 1, Australia Post will begin holding parcels for up to 30 business days before returning them — that’s up from the current 6-day holding period for regular customers and 10-day period for MyPost customers — but will begin charging small rental fees after that short grace period expires.

If you’re not a MyPost customer, you’ll be charged a $3 fee after your six business day grace period if you pick up your package before 10 business days, while 11-15 business days nets a $6 charge and between 16 and 30 business days will cost you $9. These extra charges aren’t necessarily meant to make Australia Post extra money, though.

When surveyed about the upcoming fee changes, 1500 of Australia Post’s customers said they would want to avoid their parcels being returned to sender and to also avoid extra charges, and that this would likely lead to an overall change in behaviour where customers would take extra effort to visit the post office and receive their parcels.

Australia Post’s parcel deliveries can also be dropped off securely at customers’ homes or business addresses, can be transferred to a different post office, and can be delivered to the carrier’s Parcel Lockers, which are usually installed at service stations or at shopping centres in metropolitan areas.

Australia Post also has a new deal inked with Qantas, where its StarTrack brand being launched as a domestic freight network using five Qantas Freight fleet aircraft and an additional dedicated StarTrack/Australia Post Boeing 737 freighter. The fleet will exclusively deliver Australia Post mail and parcels to nine airports servicing 80 locations around the country.

This upcoming change comes alongside the raising of the price of a standard letter to $1, as part of AusPost’s attempt to turn around mounting service costs that saw it post its first annual loss in 30 years in 2015. [Business Insider]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


8 responses to “Australia Post Is Going To Start Charging You Rent For Unclaimed Parcels”