Princetane's 3,000 Posts Super Giveaway To You!

Ken, post has been slow here for a while, so hopefully will turn up soon.

Not mine, Steve offered to do it. Postal services are a lottery I guess.

I posted them all at the same time and so far only 2 of the 9 letters have arrived. If they all land before Christmas that will be a revelation.

1. NumisRob - Crown Nov 25th
2. Zurie - Australian 2013 Coronation $2 Nov 30th (NZ time which is the most advanced in the world).

My timezone is 18 hours ahead of the site clock.

If it helps, on average mail to Steve from me takes anywhere between 2½ and 4 weeks to arrive. My first parcel to him took 6 weeks, but that was in the middle of our 3rd lockdown and NZ Post keeps harping on about "Delays caused by unpredecented demand" = We keep hiring flaky staff as no one wants to work for minimum wage in a stuffy room for hours.

Zurie and NumisRob were EXTREMELY lucky to get theirs so fast and it suggests to me, these things are flying into your country fast, but its up to Royal Mail, US Post and Canada Post to get them across your countries I guess.

Sounds exactly like the same issues we have here, delays and fingerpointing between inapt agencies.

Nothing we can do, Steve was very kind to help me out and none of this is his fault in the slightest or mine.

Coming from the stamp world, this slow down and deregulation in Postal services has been a thing for about 10 years. Up to around 2008 and even really through to 2012, the post was cheap and reliable. Had this giveaway been in 2001 or even 2011, all of you would have got the coins within 1 or 2 weeks tops and for half the cost.

But now postage rates have doubled (In 2001 it cost 40 cents local post, $2 overseas, 2011 it was 60 cents and $2.30, now its $1.50 and $3.60), volumes have dropped, post offices have switched to parcels and couriers and keep blaming emails and ebay for everything going wrong, when in fact frontline staff get paid minimum wage or not much above it, whilsts ceos and other fat cats vote in huge salaries and bonuses for doing nothing.

Ahmed Fahour of Australia Post is a good example, useless and got a $5 million dollar golden handshake, meanwile the couriers had to become contractors and pay their own tax and ACC and got performance based income (Under minimum). Postage went up 200% in 2016 (70c to $1.50, although an economy rate (slow) came in at $1) and they spent $500 million on some sorting machines that sent parcels that were supposed to go from one part of an Australian city to another all over Australia 8 or 9 times and then get lost.

Hopefully one of these days corporate greed will go out of fashion (Postal services are run by accountants and lawyers rather than government bureaucrats now and its all private profit based corporations).

Until then, we have to play the waiting game for our free coinies.

I believe my prize arrived today, my fiance told me I got mail that said prize on it lol so I have to assume it's the prize from the contest. I'll confirm tonight when I get home from work in 3 hours ish, but it looks like the Canadian prizes are arriving! And faster then I expected:)

Good work, that was one of my favourite coins there. I only replaced it with an even better one, a few months ago.

In that condition (mid VF) it is very collectible and much better than the usual worn (G - VG) examples you see of them.

Thanks for showing us

3 down 8 to go!

I wanted to say that I received my prize a couple days ago, but I am waiting to take good pics before I post so that justice is done to the coins.

Thank you very much for the contest and great prizes, Princetane! I will post as soon as I have pics.

Thank you Princetane just picked up the mail and have received your gift and that was really fast getting here. will post pics later this afternoon.

So this is what I received, not my oldest UK coin but one I did not have, 1829 Half Crown, Thanks again Princetane.



This is just like a Secret Santa gift you don't know what it is till you open it.