Suburban Mail Clearances

Southland Times, Issue 24180, 17 July 1940, Page 4

Suburban Mail Clearances

FJ APPLYING a “blanket” decision to eliminate night clearances of suburban mail boxes the Post and Telegraph Department appears to be doing Invercargill a real injustice. The decision was taken with the best of motives — the desire to conserve petrol and man-power. It is unlikely to create any serious difficulties in metropolitan centres like Wellington and Auckland, where there are frequent outgoing mails; but the position is very different in Invercargill, where the main north mail and many of the country mails close in the early morning. Most private letter writing is done in the evening and the letters are posted in suburban boxes from which, up till now, they have been cleared between 11 p.m. and midnight, in ample time to catch the north and country mails. Under the new ruling these letters will not be cleared until 2 o’clock the following afternoon, by which time they will have missed not only the morning mail for the north and many of the country mails, but the afternoon mail for Dunedin as well. Of course the department alone knows the extent to which the suburban boxes are used at night and the extent to which it can save petrol and labour by eliminating the 11 p.m. clearance. But as far as it is possible to judge without knowledge of these facts, the elimination of the afternoon clearance would seem likely to cause a great deal less inconvenience in Invercargill than the elimination of the night clearance. There is the further point, made at a meeting of the Invercargill Chamber of Commerce last week, that stopping the night clearance will to some extent defeat the Government’s purpose, since many persons will be inclined to use their own cars to bring their mail in to the Chief Post Office. If the department is able to show that it can make much more substantial economies by cancelling the night clearance than by cancelling the afternoon clearance, then the people of Invercargill may simply have to put up with the additional inconvenience and delay as a war-time necessity; but if, it is not a matter of importance which clearance is eliminated, then citizens are entitled to ask for the retention of the service that is most useful to them.