RURAL MAIL BOXES

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 11, 8 October 1936, Page 9

RURAL MAIL BOXES

1 Service Which Did Not Feel the Depression

Reassuring proof was recently published of how the Post and Telegraph Department had recovered from the depression in respect of telephone and taviugs-bank business, but there is one phase of the many-sided business of the Post Office which scarcely felt the economic -xess. Iu March, 1929, the number of country residents who paid for the rural mail-box service was 19,338. Then the depression came, with the farmer feeling the worst effects of the decline in world’s prices of primary products. Constant economy became more and more insistent in the hope of keeping expenditure within the limits of a shrinking income, but the farmer could not do without the useful service of mails to his gate and the rural bbx-holders kept on increasing in number, though the normal rate of acceleration was decreased. However, every’ year the total showed a "widening / of the range of the service until in Marell, 1936, the total number of rural box-holders was 24,723, showing that through a trying economic period there had been an increase of 5385 subscribers. The old rate of acceleration has now been resumed, and at the end of last July the total had risen to 25.116. Rural box-holders obtain a unique two-way postal service. Not only is their correspondence delivered at their gates in the specially designed boxes which are a familiar feature of the countryside, but the boxffiolders are able to' utilise the rural mail contractor for the dispatch of their correspondence and for other services which the town dweller can receive only by going to tlie post office counter. For instance,

the rural mail box-holder arranges with the contractor to stamp and post outward letters and to purchase moneyorders and postal notes. Thus the rural mail-box system plays an important part in reducing the sense of isolation of country dwellers, while the telephone service provides a further link between town and country, reinforced by radio broadcasting, another State service.