My letter box told me off…
Analogue letter boxes or post boxes (or whatever you call them in your country of origin) are the recipients of the post delivered by the postman…typically it’s a box with a hole in it. …and they have been this way since 1849.
The inventors must have been laughing all the way to the bank. Can you imagine the “Sell meeting” to potential investors:
“Hi guys and welcome to the first day of the rest of your lives…aren’t you tired of picking your mail off of the floor? Wet newspapers on the lawn? Bills hidden under piles of snow? Well, worry no more, we have done a tonne of user tests, we have asked customers, suppliers and manufacturers to get their input on a groundbreaking, revolutionary solution, our boffins at our R&D department have worked night and day to bring you the invention of tomorrow…and now we have it…we call it the Post…(pause for dramatic effect)…Box”
It can’t really get more rudimentary than a box with a hole. But it works, or at least has worked, so why change a design that has worked since 1849?
Well the postbox has existed since birth to receive the same type of “product”, typically a letter or a newspaper. Now i know what you are thinking, “there are loads of different shaps & colours & sizes of postboxes etc.”, yes, you are right, but they all have the same basic function and they are all adhere to the EN 13724:2002 “Postal services — Apertures of private letter boxes and letter plates — Requirements and test methods”. The European Standard for Letter Boxes.
Still awake? Good, now, considering the number of letters sent by the post office has decreased dramatically in correlation with the technological advancements in communication made through the years, for example email, SMS, E-invoices, internet, smoke signals etc.…these have all contributed to the “need” of written letters decreasing and the “need” for physical newspapers at an all-time low.
The growing usage & popularity of ecommerce is a retail disruption which is a challenge retailers and logistics firms have amazingly tackled by getting the customer to solve the problem.
“You have a parcel from xxx that can be picked up” — “by the way we don’t have a lot of space, so pick it up ASAP”- “if you don’t pick it up within 12 days we will send it back and you will get a bill from the sender”. Nice way of treating the people who are saving the retailers and logistics firms a lot of money. Is it really the consumers, the paying customers that need to be the involuntary solution?
Do you believe that your analogue postbox will still be there in 3–5 years? Will you still have a postman/woman on a bike? You can’t get a decent sized package on the bike or the letter boxes EU legislated size does not need to be bigger than 4cm.
You don’t get an SMS/e-mail/push signal to your phone to let you know there is mail in it. (note to self: build Postbox app). You don’t get a stern reminder from your letter box that you forget to empty it when coming home from work.
If you do remember to empty it then you have to leave your house to see if any post has been delivered and of course to get your hands on it. Now i am not the laziest of people, dont get me wrong, but there has to be a better solution than my neighbours seeing me carefully making my way down the drive in my morning boxer-shorts and wife’s slippers.
definition of inefficiency: Driving parcels to pick up centers that then get put onto shelves by workers upon delivery that then get picked off of shelves by the same workers upon collection and given to me to drive home with.
Not forgetting that i have driven home early from work to get to the pick-up to avoid being late home, and the fact that if i need to actually do some shopping whilst there I need to go back to my car, put the parcel in the car, then go back to the shops to continue shopping. For me this seems like madness, a madness i experience all too often.
So what’s the answer? Parcels in cars? Parcels home-delivered with your groceries? Automated community parcel-centres pickups? Ice cream vans with parcel delivery? A whole new infrastructure?
Whatever the solution we need to get our physical assets in line with our digital behaviours, and I believe we are so far from the ideal solution as we can be, especially when our homes are equipped with inventions that have not been sufficiently developed for over 100 years. We have an infrastructure that needs to be optimised but I am certain that we have a population of customers, retailers and logistics firms that wants to make everyone happy.
The answer isn’t always “higher” delivery costs. Sometimes it just requires new thinking. New collective thinking. And you guys need to think quick before i get told off by my letter box for not bring in the post!