On land, the yellow giant becomes the yellow trickle
After the post offices, the agencies also close
The village shops hardly benefit from the parcel boom – at most it means more work. Shops are therefore closing their post office counters again and again. K-Tipp has discovered that a replacement can only be found in around half of the cases.
Published: 8 minutes ago
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Often the Volg store is also a post office.
If a post office closes, residents in the catchment area are often put off by saying that a post office will be set up to replace it. At best, this one even has longer opening hours than the previous post office – as long as it exists.
73 shops or pharmacies that ran an agency sent the yellow giant the blue letter in 2022. As K-Tipp writes in its latest issue, the postal service admitted to the consumer magazine that over 70 shops canceled their contracts last year.
Away from your goal
The targeted number of 800 self-operated post offices, which the Post promised to stick to, has long since fallen below. She is currently at 773 spots, according to the magazine. The trend is falling – because many of the village shops close their post office counters again after a few years. In 2021 alone, 51 stores separated from agencies.
The K-Tipp gives the example of the Merz bakery in Lucerne, which is once again concentrating on plaited bread and croissants. There was always trouble with the agency, it says. Swiss Post has therefore decided that no more international parcels can be handed in at the agencies – unless the customers carry out the customs declaration themselves on the Internet.
Not enough money
The article also mentions a grocery store in Schwyz that the agency sold because Swiss Post suddenly reduced the fee for it by 20 percent. The business owner did not want to read his name and that of the business on the paper.
Blick also knows of a shop in the Bern region for which the parcel business is not worthwhile. Also because the hoped-for additional business failed to materialize. Because the person who sends his Zalando parcel back practically never reaches for the shelves and hardly ever buys anything from the store’s main range, he also stops doing postal business. This business also does not want to be named.
Apparently, hardly any of the small shops want to mess with the yellow giant in public. They just close their post office counters, quietly.
Postcom nods to everything
The fact that the postal service remains stable nationwide is therefore window dressing. Swiss Post objects to the K-Tipp that if an agency closes, in more than half of the cases a new agency can be opened in another village shop. But maybe this will close again soon.
The Federal Postal Supervisory Authority Postcom, whose task it would actually be to maintain the “universal postal service” in Switzerland, will play a peculiar role in the downsizing. “In the last two years, 23 communities have lodged complaints with Postcom about postal closures,” writes K-Tipp. In all cases, the Commission let the post office do its thing – all of these 23 branches closed the doors. (pt)