Tis a jolly good season for NZ Post
Santa’s sack is groaning with a record number of presents flying around the country for the delivery on Sunday night.
Parcel deliveries at New Zealand Post are up by 13 per cent on last year as the Christmas season enters overdrive.
Monday had the biggest volume of packages for the year, at about 160,000 out of 5.3 million mail deliveries.
“It’s an exceedingly significant increase,” New Zealand Post spokesman Richard McLean said. Mail volumes this year had hit record highs in some towns compared with previous Christmas periods, and nobody was reporting a decline in mail traffic.
Even after adding extra delivery trucks between Wellington and Auckland, New Zealand Post’s resources were stretched, he said.
“The system is at absolutely full capacity at the moment.”
Posties were delivering well over five million pieces of mail each day. “This week is one of those weeks where the mail just keeps flowing and flowing.”
The higher-than-normal volumes were probably the result of Christmas shoppers filling stockings via the Internet, Mr McLean said.
“Even apart from the Trade Me phenomenon, everyone is getting into the online shopping thing, and it all has to be transported somehow.”
Even with the increases, Santa will get an easy start in New Zealand, as he heads east to west around the globe on Christmas Eve. Americans spend almost twice what Kiwis spend on presents, and the world’s largest shipping carrier, United Parcel Service, delivered about 132 times the amount of New Zealand’s parcels on Wednesday, its busiest shipping day of the year.
UPS, which pulled in an extra 60,000 workers for the Christmas season, estimated that it sent about 21 million parcels, averaging about 240 packages every second. The Atlanta-based company normally sends 15 million parcels a day on average.
