Do you check your letter box every day hoping to get a letter? Did you know that posties deliver mail to us 6 days a week? That will change in July 2015. Mail deliveries will be reduced to only 3 days a week.
However, if you live in a rural area, you will still get mail 5 days a week. That is because in many isolated places, the contractors who deliver rural mail also deliver newspaper and groceries.
They need cars because of the distance but most posties in cities and towns deliver mail by bicycle or on foot. At the moment, there are about 2,000 of these posties in New Zealand. About half will lose their jobs in the next 18 months.
Already NZ Post has cut mail collection in the weekends. There are other small changes they could make like a 5-day delivery or a central place for letter boxes like at the end of a street. New housing areas place many letter boxes together to make it easier for the postie. But perhaps small changes are not enough. We know that in this internet age, most of us send emails instead of posting letters. However, we still do need a postal service but perhaps not 6 days a week.
Vocabulary