An employee pushes a trolley of letters and packages at a Pos Indonesia outlet in Jakarta.
Photographer: Dimas Ardian/BloombergCheckout
Think Your Postal Service Has Problems? Try Delivering to 18,000 Far-Flung Islands
- Indonesia’s postal chief says package-delivery is a money sink
- Government sets rates too low, says the former Merrill banker
You may have heard the U.S. Postal Service has problems. Well, try delivering the mail in Indonesia, a far-flung archipelago with so many islands the government literally doesn’t know how many there are.
Post offices everywhere have to contend with the fact that people send so few letters these days. In Indonesia, though, an online shopping boom that should be helping the postal service is actually hurting because regulators have set parcel delivery prices so low, according to Gilarsi Wahyu Setijono, a former Merrill Lynch investment banker who became post office president in 2015.