Every morning at around 7.30 a fleet of white vans stream into a nondescript warehouse in Fyshwick. An hour later, they stream back out into the crisp Canberra morning and disperse across the city with all those boxes containing gizmos big and small, books and cuddly toys and the rest of the paraphernalia which brighten December 25.
Behind the scenes at this time of year, Australia Post is working overtime to do the heavy-lifting Santa on a sleigh doesn't do.
So the AusPost Parcel Distribution Facility buzzes with activity first thing in the morning. The drivers drive the vans in. They fill them to the brim and then they drive them out to deliver to homes.
It's not quite like it used to be. Our spending habits have changed. We've moved online and earlier from bricks-and-mortar and last minute, a change probably accelerated by the pandemic.
Christmas spending now starts two months before the big day. "November was really, really busy because of the sales," according to Gary Starr, AusPost's General Manager for Customer and Commercial operations.
The November which has just gone was the biggest month ever for Australian online shopping. The last two weeks of the month saw 4.9 million households buy online.
The spending is concentrated around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two sales days imported from America but now seemingly as Australian as chicken parmi.
"Cyber sales are clearly here to stay, increasingly starting earlier in November and lasting longer into December," Mr Starr said.
"More people are holding out for the sales, given inflationary pressures, with online purchases growing by 42 per cent during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales when compared with the two weeks prior."
Australians are not as into online shopping as the Brits and the South Koreans. In the UK, a third of shopping is now online. In South Korea, it's half.
But we are getting there. At the start of the pandemic in February 2020, six per cent of our shopping was online. Two years later, it's 19 per cent.
As online shopping has grown so has spending on a card, helped no doubt by lingering mistrust of the human contact which cash implies. In October, Australians spent $23 billion on cards compared with only six billion dollars in October, 2019, before the pandemic.
Online shopping is good for the post office. When the internet was young, the prediction was that post offices were doomed by email. And email has replaced letters but online shopping has boosted parcels. The Australian post office is thriving - it made a profit of $55.3 million in the last financial year.
AusPost starts thinking about Christmas as early as May. Managers study forecasts of how much the economy will grow. They assess projections of online versus shopping in actual shops. And as Christmas approaches, these assessments are redone daily.
The run-up this year has been fraught.
At the beginning of October, Australia Post stopped all mail entering the country by sea, and that suspension has only just been lifted.
The cause was the pandemic: because the airline industry remained a fraction of it pre-pandemic self, mail was diverted to ships - and that overwhelmed the system.
In the year before the pandemic, AusPost received 1421 containers by sea. As the airline industry closed down, that jumped to 2624 shipping containers.
But so many containers were clogging up the depot for processing sea mail that inspectors and their sniffer dogs simply couldn't get through it in good time. The fear was that untaxed items - like cigarettes - or plants which could contaminate Australian agriculture would get through.
And then, as the pandemic waned, the rain fell. Floods disrupted the routes of the letters and packages. Train lines between eastern and western Australia were blocked so new road routes were taken.
Flooding's closed the Sydney to Perth railway for the past month. A train derailment on the Melbourne to Adelaide rail route then closed the alternative for a week.
Airborne sleighs don't have this problem.
Last posting dates
- Parcel Post within Australia (except WA and NT): Dec 12
- Parcel Post to WA and NT: too late
- Parcel Express Post (except WA and NT): Dec 19
- Parcel Express Post to WA and NT: Dec 14
- Cards and letters: Dec 19 (same state); Dec 15 (interstate)
More information on last posting dates: https://auspost.com.au/sending/christmas-sending-dates
