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arly 2024, at his home in Kloetinge – a village in the Municipality of Goes – PZC reporter Sven Remijnsen saw in the PostNL app that he was about to receive a large stack of letters. Virtually, that is, because the letters were never delivered. “About 15 letters, including mail from the GP, the hospital, school... pretty important things.”

Remijnsen tipped off a colleague covering the Goes area. Upon enquiry, it quickly became clear that almost the entire village was suffering under the lousy postal service. Birthday cards arrived far too late, so did bills, a funeral card arrived four days after the cremation... PostNL’s response? Remijnsen has heard it over and over again. Staff shortages, annoying and our apologies.

Remijnsen had the feeling that there was more going on and called on PZC readers to share their experiences via PZC.nl. “That’s when things really started to happen, I received dozens of responses from all over Zeeland. And not because the TV guide came a day too late. No, serious problems. People who missed their hospital appointment. Or a funeral because the mail arrived too late or not at all.

The reporter came into contact with a funeral director, for example, who had been struggling for months because bereavement mail wasn’t arriving. “He ended up driving around Zeeland himself to deliver the cards. I thought: if a funeral director has to deliver his own mail, that’s a whole new story.”

Remijnsen published that story (‘Postbezorging in Zeeland is een drama’) in February, including PostNL’s response: staff shortages, annoying, apologies. And there was a story on how the postal worker’s status has changed; once a respected person in the towns and villages of Zeeland, now someone who is blamed for the poor delivery.

This once again resulted in many reactions. The Lower House asked critical questions of the Minister of Economic Affairs about the postal crisis exposed by PZC in Zeeland. 

Postal workers also made their voices heard. They were fed up with the bad press about their work. Remijnsen talked to them, joined them on their rounds and discovered something surprising. The poor mail delivery service, which PostNL blamed on staff shortages, appeared to have a very different cause. 

The company introduced new routes in the summer of 2023. The routes were introduced as ‘logical delivery’ and had been developed with the help of AI. According to the postal workers, things have gone wrong since then. Neighbourhoods have become much larger and the routes are not logical, resulting in a lot of time being lost. These are problems that the postal workers reported to their managers, but nothing was done with their complaints. That is, until PZC wrote about what was going on.

The delivery of mail in Zeeland is now back to how it should be. Remijnsen shows us an email that he received recently from one of the postal workers in his stories: “The management board of PostNL came to Zeeland to listen to us. This would never happened were it not for the stories in PZC. We are now allowed to arrange the routes with more of our own input and problem neighbourhoods are being tackled. Things are much better than earlier this year.”