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A few weeks ago, I took an afternoon off from Skiviez as a small mental health day. During my drive home from work, I calmly navigated to the street that my house is on, drove well past the house that I live in, and–this is the scary part–proceeded to get back on the interstate and head back to work.
It is as though I had completely forgotten that my goal was to go home, and I had reset myself into “going back to work mode” sometime during the drive. It wasn’t until several miles later that I was clued in to my mistake by observing that the usually jam-packed interstate was deserted in the middle of the day.
What’s the point of this story? To show that I personally understand that otherwise normally functioning, intelligent adults occasionally suffer from a brief but utterly total and complete mental shutdown. In that spirit, for our Canadian customers out there who keep asking about the status of their air mail shipments, we’d like to remind you that your postal system has been on strike and shut down for over a week.
The usual response to this information is a sheepish “oh, right” or a “THAT’S why I haven’t gotten any mail.” (And I reply, “Don’t worry, I completely understand. I shouldn’t even be at work right now.”)
Wait, what? Really? When did this happen?
Mmhmm, it’s true. Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers have repeatedly failed to negotiate a contract renewal, with most of the dispute centered around future wage increases. With both sides at an impasse, the Canadian postal service effectively shut down last week with the exception of a few rural routes as workers went on strike.
After mail destined for Canada began to pile up in USPS sorting facilities, USPS stopped accepting all Canada-bound mail on Saturday, June 18th. This means that we can’t process air mail orders for Canada even if we wanted to, since USPS would reject the parcel and send it right back to us.
After a week of failed negotiations, the Canadian government is in the process of drafting legislation to forcibly end the strike. The lawmakers say they’ll try to get the legislation passed before the end of the weekend, but it’s still a wait-and-see situation.
In the meantime, we’ve been contacting directly the customers whose orders and backorders have been affected, giving them the option for us to either hold their order on our end until the strike is completed or to upgrade to a FedEx International carrier method (at the higher price point).
Hum. But my order already shipped two weeks ago….
If you ordered some underwear from us recently and it shipped out via USPS First Class Mail International to Canada, then you’ll unfortunately not receive your parcel until several weeks after the strike has ended. That’s because both USPS and Canada Post are expecting to have huge backlogs of parcels to process, which means the already lengthy Canadian customs clearance process will increase during the end of June and the start of July.
While we always take care of our international customers who don’t receive their air mail parcels within 60 business days of the shipping date by issuing a refund or a re-shipment, we may have to extend this deadline for recent Canadian shipments due to the extenuating circumstances. Your Skiviez parcel is still on it’s way to you, but it’s sitting in a USPS or Canada Post warehouse somewhere, longing to be touched again by a postal worker who can bring it to your hot little hands.
