Paddy McPherson, Plumstead
My sister sent me a small package, by airmail and registered, from Portugal on Friday April 20.
To date, this parcel has not been received and the poor post office here cannot tell me where it is. Even though it has a tracking number, it is just “in Johannesburg”.
Surely international postal authorities would have something to say that a registered parcel is handled by our postal authorities in Johannesburg in such a manner?
* Martie Gilchrist, spokeswoman for the SA Post Office, responds: Following the strike in July, the backlog of international parcels will take a while because mail from other countries continued to enter South Africa at normal rates despite the strike.
Customers expecting goods from outside of the country are requested to bear with us. All international air mail is processed through the Johannesburg International Mail Centre, and the clearance process is more intricate as the shipments have to be checked for illegal contents and assessed for import duty.
The post office is currently implementing options to speed up the processing of the international backlog, including deploying staff from other facilities and introducing extra shifts.
We understand the importance and value of each mail item and apologise for the inconvenience.
We have some
good news for Ms McPherson: her parcel, which now had a local tracking number allocated to it, was scanned on Tuesday August 21 to the Plumstead depot for delivery. A second parcel doesn’t have a local tracking number allocated to it yet, but it has arrived in Johannesburg.
We would like to thank our customers for their patience and understanding as we work to return mail processing to normal.
