The cost of community mail delivery is not unknown.Imagine that UPS figured that delivering packages to your door is a real sucker's game, and they were in a monopoly industry where they could unilaterally make moves that competitors couldn't competitively undermine.
So they want to build big, onerous, eyesore structures everywhere throughout a neighborhood.
How much do you think it would cost them to do that? What do you think they will pay to rent the spaces, for instance?
Canada Post pays nothing. The federal government just forced it on municipalities. To make this even more built on imaginary economics, Canada Post forces developers to pay for Canada Post to install the superboxes ($200 per address).
One of those beautiful forms of downloading that of course end-users pay for, but somehow it saves the end user money.
In any case, Canada Post does not publish numbers for CMBs. They publish numbers for group mailboxes (how credible and all inclusive they are we certainly don't know), which includes a massive array of group deliveries, of which superboxes are a subset.
I actually worked part-time as a mail carrier doing home delivery once. It's not easy work, especially in the winter.
I'm not saying it is. But what is happening here is a battle between the union and Canada Post, and both are a part of the problem. One of the reasons home delivery has so many imaginary expenses is that it is a secret known country wide that doing home delivery is a dream job because you are paid for the route, but most carriers can complete the route in a small fraction of a work day, though it is assessed, over long battled union rules, as a full work day.
It's a battle of imaginary work and imaginary expenses, and in the end everyone loses.