It’s been over a month since our last update, so we have been overdue for some news. During this time we have been following the latest data, slicing it in different ways and sometimes squinting our eyes really hard trying to find some hopeful numbers… but sadly, we don’t have any exciting numbers to share.
That said, we have some news and an update about this suspension. But first, some context.
When we decided to place this temporary block, China was going through several large strict lockdowns due to the pandemic, some affecting international mail sorting centers (with some countries stop sending to China due to that), and even some domestic mail routes within China were having trouble. Things were quite bad. Over several weeks, little mail was being delivered and the average travel times were only growing (doubling within just a few months), forming a large backlog of pending mail. Importantly, there was no clear end in sight at that point. So, not knowing when (and if) things would get back to normal is what took us to preventively put this suspension in place. We know this was not welcomed by everyone, but still believe to be the correct decision considering the circumstances.
Since then, and as far as we know, international mail sorting centers on China seem to be working again and mail is being delivered. So we were hoping that delivery of all that delayed mail would have been prioritized, but… it’s not been the case. Backlogged postcards are being delivered, but very very slowly, and travel times have been mostly expanding.
However, — and this is the only upside on all this — mail is still being delivered (again, very slowly!), which is something back in June we couldn’t be sure about amidst all the ongoing strict lockdowns. Some postcards are arriving with 3, 4, even 5 months of delay (and many even later, which is crazy!), but slowly they seem to be arriving to their destinations.
Here’s how things are at the moment:
It’s important to note this about this chart: because we suspended this route on June 15th and there’s no new postcards since then, at this point (and going forward) the average travel times (red line) is expected to go up, and the number of received postcards (blue line) will naturally trend down, unless a significant portion of the backlog is finally delivered. Also, because we’ve suspended this destination almost three months ago, we don’t have new data about mail sent more recently, so our knowledge on how things are progressing is becoming limited.
We don’t know if average travel times of several months is the new normal for mail to China (and we really hope not!). Also, we no longer expect a sudden clearing of the backlog: for whatever reason, backlogged mail is being cleared very very slowly, and we don’t have a good and clear explanation for this. So, what now?
Considering all this, we decided to restore this destination, although with some constraints. We will restart selecting addresses in China again but, for now, we will be throttling the rate at which they will be selected.
The goal with this throttling is to start slowly restoring the route while we continue to measure when those new postcards arrive, and at the same time, not having a huge wave that would suddenly form if we would restore it all at once. Our hope is that the backlogged mail continues to slowly be cleared over the coming months, while these new postcards will, hopefully, start to be delivered within more normal times again, although that is outside of our control.
We don’t think the issue is completely solved though, and we will re-evaluate this over time. All going well, we will increase the rate at which we select addresses in China, with the goal of fully dropping the throttling in a few months.
If, however, travel times continue to expand even further than what we have been seeing over the last months, we’ll need to re-evaluate this once again. Ultimately, to participate in Postcrossing, one needs to be able to send and receive postcards reliably.
Right now we are still completing the work for this throttling process to be possible, and we hope to have it ready in the next couple of days so, soon, you’ll start seeing addresses from China again.
Fingers and toes crossed that the mail gods will be in our favor and these postcards will soon be making many mailboxes happy again.