Russian Post is a state-owned enterprise that services the delivery of items of any kind on the territory of the Russian Federation. To understand why there are certain problems in the mail, it is useful to learn more about how the whole system works in general.
Working hours
Russian Post is one of the largest enterprises in the entire country, it can only be compared with Sberbank. It employs more than 370 thousand people, it includes about 42 thousand branches throughout Russia. The Post handles more than 1.5 billion letters, approximately 50 million parcels and 114 million remittances during the year.
Each post office has its own opening hours, but every major city has a main post office that operates around the clock.
Internal mail
Sorting of internal mail takes place in automated sorting centers (ASC). ASC in Central Russia is the largest in Eastern Europe. About 3 million items are processed here a day, which are collected from 5200 post offices.
Automated lines also existed in the USSR. Over time, they became obsolete, in addition, new types of envelopes appeared that could no longer be processed by such machines. After the collapse of the USSR, Russian Post worked rather slowly, since all correspondence was sorted by hand.
Today, for sorting in all regions, automated centers equipped with various machines are used or are being introduced.
The machines analyze the size and weight of postal items, and automatically stamp the cancellation stamp. For processing, employees only receive what the machine could not recognize, for example, all shipments with illegibly signed indexes.
Based on the information about the indexes, the machine sorts letters by region.
International mail
MMPO (Place of International Postal Exchange) of Moscow is a terminal that receives all postal items from other countries. All mail from abroad without fail passes through it.
Here, postal items, including orders via the Internet, are inspected by customs at MMPO. Parcels are scanned, and if employees find something prohibited, they open the shipment and draw up an act. The content itself is sent back.
Over the past few years, the international branch of the Russian Post has been modernized, but the number of postal items is still growing faster than the post manages to recruit new employees and expand.
Why mail is slow
There are several reasons for the delay in international mail.
All sorting centers for processing parcels from abroad are located in central Russia. Even if the departure is from China to Vladivostok, it still flies an additional thousand kilometers for verification.
At normal times, the post office copes with the deadlines, but during peak times of the year, Russian Post experiences peak loads when the number of postal items increases dramatically. Since the company does not increase its staff for this period, it takes more time to process correspondence.
