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The fight is on: bike vs. Internet
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| Email has changed our way of doing business. Is there still a place for the road warriors on two wheels who battle traffic to get documents across town from office to office? Montreal Gazette, September 06, 2005 By Kazi Stastna Any office worker or commuter can recognize their skewed tote bags, fluttering waybills and fearless cycling style. Love 'em or hate 'em, bicycle messengers are as much a part of the downtown core as traffic congestion - but for how much longer? Recent media reports from some U.S. cities suggest bike messengers are not as ubiquitous as they once were, thanks to an ever increasing capacity to send everything from text to video and audio files via the Internet. But an informal survey has shown that in Montreal, rumours of the bike couriers' demise are greatly exaggerated. The industry has weathered technological advances in the past and will adjust to the recent changes, too, local operators say. "We watched the arrival of the fax and thought it would reduce business, and it didn't. We watched the arrival of email and thought it would reduce business, and it didn't. Today, (the industry) is still growing," Courrier Rapide owner Richard Boudreau said. Boudreau's family-owned company has been doing rush deliveries in and around Montreal since 1972. Although the Internet has cost him some letter and document traffic (income tax time, for example, is no longer the boom period it once was), it hasn't disrupted deliveries of other items like architectural plans, marketing products, medical supplies or legal papers. The result is that Courrier Rapide has about the same number of bike messengers (between 10 and 15) and drivers (about 25) today as it did 10 years ago. Boudreau said he has recently had to hire more messengers to keep up with an average of 800 to 1,000 orders a day. There are about 200 bike messengers on the streets of Montreal in winter and 300 in summer. They work for an average commission of 50 per cent to 60 per cent per delivery. Those numbers haven't changed much in the last five years, says Nicolas Dalicieux, a former messenger turned union organizer. About 50 companies compete for business in the downtown core, with fewer than a dozen controlling the bulk of the market. If one takes in the city's surrounding areas and all the partner companies of larger players, Montreal has a total of about 250 companies, said Sylvain Boulay, operations manager at Courriercom Express, which also owns the Prodoc and Messagex courier services. "You have the whole range - the mom and pop operation out of a basement of their house running four drivers and three clients, and you have the big guys like us, running 3,000 clients and 1,500 deliveries a day," he said. Most operators agree that rather than a dramatic drop in numbers, what technology has brought to the industry is a change of habits. "There definitely has been a decline in business, but one area will decline and another will come up," said Peter Hansen of QA/Transor, one of Montreal's largest messenger companies. "A travel agency that used to print all tickets and have them sent by courier now sends tickets electronically. But at the same time, there is so much shopping online - you no longer go to Sears to pick up your merchandise; it's a courier company that delivers it to you." Certain sectors, like finance, law, architecture and media, still rely heavily on rush deliveries. "It's true that fax and emails and all that reduced our numbers a bit, but at the same time, the only way to have an original contract with a signature delivered within the hour is still by messenger," bike messenger Julien Jolicoeur, 25, said. But those niches are slowly shrinking, says Phil Cahley, president of the Canadian Courier and Messenger Association. "The electronic age is moving us toward acceptance of electronic signatures via email, and that will further erode that type of business," he said. That has more and more messenger companies exploring the logistical side of the industry and outsourcing their services, he said - handling warehousing and distribution for online companies, for example. Far from devastating the industry, Internet technology has generated new business by making it easier for customers to place orders, track packages and manage invoices online, said Jack Hansen, who co-owns QA/Transor with his brother Peter and manages its Toronto operations. Before QA automated its business a few years ago, tracking a signature used to be a 30-minute process involving several phone calls and waybills in quadruplicate, he said. Today, messengers enter data directly onto a network via a cellphone. The information appears online in seconds. But the advances that have helped some companies have proven to be a barrier to others. The cost of going digital, together with rising fuel and insurance prices, means smaller players can no longer sustain the price cutting that has gone on in the industry for years and have less chance of surviving today than they did 10 years ago, says Marie-Jose Vanasse, co-owner of Courrier Plus. In the meantime, entrepreneurs looking to enter the business face much higher startup costs. "It used to be, 'Give me a telephone and a desk, and I'm a courier company.' Today, it's 'Give me a desk, a telephone and a $75,000 network of computers and Internet access,' " Peter Hansen said. He should know. He quit his job as a driver at a local messenger company in 1992 and began operating what today is a $7-million business in four cities out of a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Montreal. It might be harder today for messengers to do the same, but it doesn't mean they'll lack for work, says Tom Ostreiko, who has been doing bike deliveries downtown for five years. "I don't think we're ever going to run out of business," he said. "The day The Gazette stops being printed and goes to online edition only, maybe there won't be any bike messengers, but I doubt that day will ever come." Still, the continuing price wars that characterize the local industry mean messengers have to work harder to earn a decent living. Five years ago, Jolicoeur said, a good day's work meant between $120 to $150; today, even the most industrious messengers have trouble earning $100. Fierce undercutting - sometimes by as much as 20 per cent - means clients can pay as little as $2 for a call that has a messenger pedaling from, say, St. Laurent Blvd. to Greene Ave. (the industry average is closer to $3), Boulay said. "The market is very, very competitive. There are probably way too many companies for a city the size of Montreal. It's really a free-for-all out there," he said. Tomorrow: The Gazette examines unionization efforts in the local courier industry, one year after the controversial agreement several Montreal companies signed with the Teamsters union. |
