How many carriers finish their routes each day? Is it a lot.. few.. is it typically the same routes that do.. etc?
My neighbour is home by mid afternoon a lot of days.. his kid is newer.. typically works full days... I think he's a temp.
OK, so that’s a bit of a complicated question.
If you’re a route “owner” - you do the same route every single day. Mondays are almost always overtime for everyone. Tuesdays are usually overtime for a majority of posties. Weds-Friday are typically lower volume days, and sometimes posties are done at 3:30 or so, but only if they modify the routes to make them more efficient. If you follow the route directions precisely as CP wants you to do then, you will be taking the whole day.
Once a depot switches to SSD (Separate Sort and Delivery), you cannot modify your routes to make them more efficient. Everything is organized exactly the way CP wants it to be done. The Waterloo depot switched to SSD about 2 months ago. From what I have been told, there are about 5-8 routes that, before the strike, were 1 week behind in mail delivery. The routes were simply made too long to deliver in a single day without overtime.
Some routes are absolute monsters. One of the larger mobile routes (1600 points of call) is about 20 hours of overtime a week. Consistently. My old route had 170 stories of stairs a day (for reference, the CN Tower main deck is 155 stories) not including hills. If I hit every house, the route would be 32km. On average, it was 25-26km a day of walking.
CP builds the routes after doing mail counts and cuts jobs every few years. In the last 20 years, Guelph has lost 25 full time routes, and they have been absorbed by the others.
I am currently a “Relief Letter Carrier” — I do not have an assigned route. I pick up pieces of multiple routes every day and deliver them. If route owners need help due to heavy volume, appointments etc. Throughout the entire summer, I am doing different full routes every day, filling in for vacations, personal days etc.
The summer is overtime for me pretty much every day. I’m not familiar with all the routes (WTF is the mail slot on this house?!?! Not certain of how certain parts connect, sorting mail in stations where I don’t know where the streets are, which relay boxes are best to use, etc).
Your neighbour is guaranteed modifiying his route to get done faster if he is home that early. The modifications will 100% fly in the face of CP rules (which side of the street you’re walking on, where you start, where you stop and cab to your next part, criss-crossing streets).
