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Leuk stukje naar aanleiding van het niet meer leveren via de Zuid Afrikaanse postmaatschappij door Amazon i.v.m. de vele diefstallen:
PRETORIA. A day after US online retail giant Amazon announced that it was no
longer offering South African customers standard postal delivery due to
massive theft by SA Post Office employees, the post office has announced
that it will sell cut-price books, DVDs and CDs direct to the public outside
the back door of its branches nationwide.
According to a statement made by Post Office spokesman Gift Mkhize, the new
retail outlets would operate on a cash-only, first-come first-served,
don't-ask-don't-tell basis.
He added that for those customers who did not feel like queuing there would
be “mobile franchises” parked near most branches, where the public was
welcome to buy goods out of the boots of Post Office employees' cars.
Asked if the Post Office was ashamed at being the only postal service in
Africa to be blacklisted by the US retail giant, Mkhize was defiant, saying
that Amazon's bold branding on its packaging was to blame for the rampant
pilfering.
“Those parcels have ‘Amazon’ written all over them,” he said. "Our employees
find this very provocative.
"Most of our staff are functionally illiterate, but over the years, handling
many printed items, some of them have developed a rudimentary sense of
lettering, and that big A and big Z are unmistakable."
He said that expecting Post Office staff not to pocket their clients'
packages was "as naïve as expecting Members of Parliament not to fiddle
their expense accounts".
According to Mkhize, the decision to sell merchandise outside the back door
of branches had been made at board level, after initial anti-theft measures
proved ineffective.
He said that a 2003 initiative to install metal detectors at staff entrances
had been compromised when all the metal detectors were stolen by employees,
who then sold them back to the Post Office, which subsequently lost them.
“It was very demoralizing,” he said. "At least this way our employees feel
like stakeholders in the whole process."
Meanwhile a police spokesman has admitted that postal theft is very
difficult to tackle.
Superintendent Magda Siff said that the problem was compounded by the fact
that Post Offices clerks traditionally moved “incredibly slowly”.
"Anyone who has ever used a Post Office in South Africa knows that it takes
up to twenty minutes for the sullen lady at Counter 4 to get off her stool,
waddle into a back room, have a cup of tea and packet of tennis biscuits,
and waddle back with the wrong parcel.
"During this time she has any number of opportunities to secret away DVDs
and suchlike in her industrial-strength underwear."
She said new bras featuring heavy-duty underwires, high-tensile nylon straps
and titanium clasps could cope with much greater loads.
"We're seeing small TVs, ant farms, box sets of Desperate Housewives. That
kind of stuff."
She urged the public to report suspiciously rectangular breasts by calling
the police's postal theft hotline at 1-800-LOS-DAAI-*&^$#@.
