The announcement by Greyhound in early July that they'll cease operating west of Thunder Bay, Ontario at the end of October has caused great consternation among people who use their service to get around.  

It's also causing angst among businesses that use their service to ship goods to their customers.  One of those businesses is Custom Woolen Mills of Carstairs who is a customer of the Crossfield Greyhound Depot.  Fen Roessingh of Custom Woolen Mills says Greyhound's announcement has left them scratching their heads as they try to come up with another shipping solution.

"We ship all over Canada.  Greyhound ships to smaller communities, outside of Canada Post, which does smaller packages, Greyhound is the only place that ships to smaller communities.  We're a small woolen mill.  We wash, card, spin and make bedding products.  Wool can be awfully fluffy so it gets difficult to ship when you have quite a few comforters, in terms of bedding products.  We've put them in bigger parcels and ship them by Greyhound."

Roessingh says the news was sad for the woolen mill.  "The folks in small communities, those are the folks who still use woolen comforters and woolen mattress pads and knit and so on.  The bigger centres don't necessarily have that kind of background.  Unless somebody else comes in and fills in the spot, there's just not going to be shipping to smaller communities.  Loomis, FedEx, Purolator, they might ship from Calgary, which is an hour drive for us, to Victoria but they might not have an office in Parksville on Vancouver Island for instance.  Suddenly you've got this broken up shipping system."

Roessingh says to top it off, the timing of Greyhound's departure from Western Canada couldn't have been timed much worse for Custom Woolen Mills as it comes right as their Christmas rush starts.

"Greyhound is cutting out at the end of October, that means we can't ship after the end of September to be safe.  When we're just gearing up for our Christmas rush, we're really having to scramble to get things to people.  So far all we've really been able to do is alert the customers that we've been shipping to by Greyhound that we really need their orders to be in and shipped by the end of September.  We really don't know if there's a good alternative.  We're working on that but it's all fairly new.  We're scrambling."

Roessingh says they may have to use Canada Post to ship items to some customers, but that makes for a lot more work for them.  "We can compress stuff to make a big order into small enough packages for Canada Post to accept.  The other thing we can ask some of our customers to go to pallet orders but that makes it bigger order than they want.  We hope something else will come together but we're just not sure."

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