Big job losses likely at NZ Post
New Zealand Post’s new post-code system will cost businesses up to $3000 a year and will potentially axe hundreds of mail workers’ jobs.
The state-owned postal service will today start sending mailers to every household, rural address and post office box informing them of their new four-digit postcode.
The codes, which divide the country into 1800 zones, start with 0 in Northland and 9 in the deep south, and will replace the existing, little used codes.
New Zealand Post used to provide business with free access to its existing mailing database, which helps to make mail delivery more accurate and efficient.
Under the new system, however, business wanting the information to apply to their bulk-mail list will have to pay $1000 a year, or $3000 if the information is used to produce a resaleable data-base. Both services included quarterly updates.
Businesses that did not include the new codes in their mail-outs would not receive a bulk-mail discount.
New Zealand Post chief executive of postal services Peter Fenton said the old database contained about 81,000 street names around the country, and still required users to verify their addresses.
By comparison the new database contained 1.8 million individual addresses, making it a vastly more sophisticated and useful tool, Fenton said.
The fees only covered the costs of running the service and support customers, he said.
The new-codes ensures there are no streets with the same name within an urban postcode.
New Zealand Post spokesman Richard MacLean said hundreds of jobs nationally would be lost when $80 million new processing machines were in place in six urban areas.
Most of these job losses will be in provincial areas including Tauranga, Taupo and New Plymouth.
It would take five years before the total number of jobs affected was known.
The old codes will be dropped in two years.
