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food / travel

How DHL And Germany's Post Office Plan To Conquer The Online Food Delivery Business

DIE WELT (Germany)

Worldcrunch

BERLIN - By 2016 Deutsche Post wants to have its own national online food retail operation up and running.

A spokeswoman said the company has been planning the move for some time and that the challenge was setting up a system of outlets around Germany that would stock a wide selection of foods, Die Welt reports.

Deutsche Post is presently testing ways to dispatch refrigerated and frozen items in special dry-ice packaging. The company is also looking at refrigeration units that would be installed in DHL delivery trucks – DHL is a Deutsche Post subsidiary.

Cooling issues are not the biggest problem: effective systems need to be put into place in order to get orders to customers swiftly. Customers would be advised that their order was filled and underway by e-mail or SMS, and could select the time and place of delivery – for example, the office in the evening just before they called it a day and headed home.

In December 2011, Deutsche Post bought shares in allyouneed.com, on online food store, and now owns 90% of it. The company is looking to build other partnerships with online food retailers.

Deutsche Post already delivers some pretty cool things:

Photos Deutsche Post

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Society

Genoa Postcard: A Tale Of Modern Sailors, Echos Of The Ancient Mariner

Many seafarers are hired and fired every seven months. Some keep up this lifestyle for 40 years while sailing the world. Some of those who'd recently docked in the Italian port city of Genoa, share a taste of their travels that are connected to a long history of a seafaring life.

A sailor smokes a cigarette on the hydrofoil Procida

A sailor on the hydrofoil Procida in Italy

Daniele Frediani/Mondadori Portfolio via ZUMA Press
Paolo Griseri

GENOA — Cristina did it to escape after a tough breakup. Luigi because he dreamed of adventures and the South Seas. Marianna embarked just “before the refrigerator factory where I worked went out of business. I’m one of the few who got severance pay.”

To hear their stories, you have to go to the canteen on Via Albertazzi, in Italy's northern port city of Genoa, across from the ferry terminal. The place has excellent minestrone soup and is decorated with models of the ships that have made the port’s history.

There are 38,000 Italian professional sailors, many of whom work here in Genoa, a historic port of call that today is the country's second largest after Trieste on the east coast. Luciano Rotella of the trade union Italian Federation of Transport Workers says the official number of maritime workers is far lower than the reality, which contains a tangle of different laws, regulations, contracts and ethnicities — not to mention ancient remnants of harsh battles between shipowners and crews.

The result is that today it is not so easy to know how many people sail, nor their nationalities.

What is certain is that every six to seven months, the Italian mariner disembarks the ship and is dismissed: they take severance pay and after waits for the next call. Andrea has been sailing for more than 20 years: “When I started out, to those who told us we were earning good money, I replied that I had a precarious life: every landing was a dismissal.”

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