Driftwood staff are among those cheering a seeming end to the month-long postal strike that saw regular newspaper distribution operations disrupted.
It’s not that no sympathy is due to postal workers, whose wages and working conditions have been credibly described in media reports as wanting; or to the Crown corporation, for that matter, which continues to lose money.
It’s not that we didn’t like seeing many of our subscribers face-to-face in the Driftwood office. That part was most enjoyable, even if it made it a bit more challenging to get our regular work done.
But it also made us appreciate the sorting and delivery job done by our local post office workers. We’ve had enough of postal code juggling and gymnastics for awhile and are happy to hand the task back to the experts.
The Driftwood was just one of hundreds of local small businesses and organizations impacted by the strike at the worst-possible time of year. Many craftspeople, for example, had to seek alternate ways to ship goods to customers.
Nonprofit organizations that mount annual giving campaigns in November and December — encouraging donors to take advantage of the Dec. 31 deadline for donations to be tax receipt-eligible in the calendar year — were particularly impacted. Some members of the older generation, for whom annual donations are a natural part of civic and financial life, prefer to use cheques and the mail service to get their contributions where they need to go. They are understandably not comfortable with the various online options for giving, and short of visiting an organization’s offices during opening hours in-person, which is not convenient for everyone, no other option existed.
Hopefully with the mail-in option restored, people will remember to make their donations as soon as possible, as local charitable groups rely on that annual infusion to their budgets.
One more thing for people to remember is to pay their bills, even if paper reminders didn’t arrive in the mail in the past month.