On a bright Thursday morning, Vancouver shoe designer John Fluevog drives his Mazda to an apartment building in the city’s West End.
There, he takes the elevator up five floors and drops off a pair of black boots.
He doesn’t usually make house calls, but as the Canada Post strike is now into its third week, he says he wanted to help make sure his customers got their orders.
“I’m so happy I could make that delivery,” he said.
Vancouver designer John Fluevog personally drops off shoes and boots of his own creation to customers across the Lower Mainland.
The next day, he plans to take an order to the Sunshine Coast.
“It’s nice to connect with people.”
More than 55,000 Canada Post workers have been on strike since Nov. 15, after a year of failed negotiations to reach a new collective agreement. Bargaining continued until earlier this week when negotiations between Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) broke down.
Talks were suspended on Wednesday when the federally appointed mediator said that the Crown corporation and the union “remain[ed] too far apart on critical issues for mediation to be successful at this time.”
The strike has left many retailers looking for alternative shipping options, and for some Canadians, it’s led to more serious disruptions, including the recent case of a loved one’s ashes stuck in the mail.
Melissa Renaud, who owns a small Etsy-based business in Port Coquitlam, said that while she cares for her local postal workers, she is looking at shipping alternatives. Over the past two weeks, she’s discovered another carrier that gets packages to customers quickly, and she said it was easy for her to navigate.
“It has definitely opened my eyes that there are other options other than Canada Post, and it’s something that I’m going to be doing a spreadsheet [for] and working out all the numbers to see like where my margins are moving forward,” she told Stephen Quinn, the host of CBC’s The Early Edition.
While Fluevog realizes there are other courier options, he figured delivering a few pairs of shoes would be more fun.
“I thought it’d be kind of nice to personally deliver someone’s order,” he said.