New Zealand Post is concerned its Christmas workload is down this year.
Postal workers are handling up to five million items per day - which is one to two million more than normal volumes.
But postal chief executive Peter Fenton says that is down about 4% on other years, representing about 200,000 items of mail per day.
He says the postal service has heavy fixed costs and it is not easy to adjust staffing levels according to mail volumes.
He says the numbers of Christmas cards are down and so are parcels from overseas. People are paying bills online or at the counter rather than sending a cheque through the mail.
