
The Puhoi General Store has post boxes, parcels, counter delivery – and a clutch of different postcodes.
Frustrated Puhoi resident Andrew Cranna-Powell.
A Puhoi resident is at his wits’ end after trying to get to the bottom of why the village has at least five different addresses and postcodes being used for postal and courier deliveries.
Andrew Cranna-Powell of Ahuroa Road says for several years there have been an increasing number of misdirected, delayed and non-delivered items, especially couriered parcels that needed to be picked up from the Puhoi Store.
“A few years back it was common for courier parcels and mail to be addressed simply to the Puhoi Store, Puhoi and for them to reliably arrive there,” he said. “Then something changed.
“There appears to be confusion between NZ Post, couriers, and their RD contractors about courier/mail sorting and processing for Puhoi – and therefore what happens to parcels as a result. There have been numerous instances of parcels bouncing back and forth between the NZ Post processing centre,
Warkworth, and Rural Delivery contractors (sometimes for weeks), with the effect that parcels get significantly delayed or lost.”
He said courier postcodes currently being used for the Puhoi Store that he was aware of included Silverdale RD 1 0994; Puhoi 0873; Warkworth 0994; Puhoi 0951 and Puhoi 0983.
And despite lengthy correspondence and meetings between concerned locals and NZ Post, Mr Cranna-Powell said, beyond acknowledgement that there were issues and that Puhoi was at a nexus of delivery routes, no concrete solutions had been put forward. Indeed, at one stage, NZ Post had suggested using yet another address variation involving two extra Rural Delivery routes.
“This saga just gets messier each time we dig further into it,” he said. “There is no visible and authoritative point of truth.”
NZ Post’s manager of network capability and performance, Mike Lockyer, said the organisation had a massive national postal address database which was consistently being updated “daily and weekly”. Information for that came from sources including Land Information, councils, large building companies such as retirement village developers, and local posties. However, he was unable to shed light on why so many postcodes were popping up for Puhoi from couriers.
“I couldn’t comment on why there are up to five different postcodes for Puhoi,” he said. “We would recognise two of those (0994 and 0951), for the counter delivery and the physical address. Where the others have come from I don’t know, they don’t belong there from our postcode database.”
He said that while NZ Post encouraged large senders to use its addressing data, there were now many more parcels being delivered by small businesses, or from international senders, over which they had no control at all.
“That’s the information the courier has in front of them, and they can source that from anywhere,” he said. “We don’t have control of that data; I don’t know where they source that from.”
Mr Lockyer added that at the end of the day, the address provided on a parcel was put there by the sender, which may not comply with NZ Post’s data. Mr Lockyer suggested recipients informed the sender if they had used a wrong address or postcode.
He also said that the correct address for Puhoi Store was actually Counter Delivery, Puhoi PostCentre, Puhoi 0951.
Mr Cranna-Powell remained unimpressed, however.
“They have added yet another address! No one from Post has mentioned the Counter Delivery address to me in the 12 months I have been trying to get this sorted out. We used to use Counter Delivery as our mailing and courier address before six-digit PO Box numbers were forced upon us, at which point this whole mess started.”
Mahurangi Matters contacted four couriers to ask what addressing data they used, but only two responded – NZ Couriers said it sorted by branch codes, not postcodes, and its address checker tool showed the Puhoi Store as a non-urban/rural zone. PBT Couriers said it used the Silverdale RD 1 0994 variant, but did not respond when asked why that was.