Did you hear the one about your snail mail turning into carrier pigeon mail? Well Sonya Feldoff of ABC Afternoons Adelaide did and it started one of our regular chats about the future of postal and general deliveries.

Reprising an earlier on air conversation I had with Brisbane ABC we chatted about the reality that only 2.1% of mail delivered is person to person, 45.4% is business to business and 36.2% is business to consumer, so the decline in physical mail is due to a whole raft of reasons fanned by technology advancement including email, pay on-line options and a multitude of communication tools like Facebook, snapchat, twitter, Skype and the list goes on.

The other seismic change is of course our unending desire for instant communication rather than a it’s in the post and you should get it in a couple of days pace.

The discussion soon turned to delivery of parcels which is growing and some of the different business models on the rise including services that accept delivery for you during the day and then re deliver it to you at night or at a time more convenient to you.

Other models include a crowdsourced approach where other shoppers may elect to deliver your goods to you for a fee which has been trialled by Ikea; using a casualised labour website like Airtasker to find someone to pick it up or deliver it for you and of course the one that had listeners calling in the drone and self driving car deliveries.

Listener Brad was most keen on having his parcels delivered to him by a fully autonomous driverless van and wasn’t all that excited when I suggested he may be waiting about 15 years or so for his next parcel, but Jenny of Port Augusta made a great point that in country and regional areas they’ve always had crowdsourced deliveries with neighbours helping neighbours doing deliveries, pick ups and drop offs for each other.

Great conversation around an industry and entrenched way of doing something that we always assumed would go on for ever and is now falling apart, seeing huge staff sackings and forcing users and suppliers to re-imagine how, where, when and what of getting mail and parcel deliveries so have a listen now (12 minutes 48 seconds) and then share your thoughts on tomorrow’s world of mail and parcel deliveries.