Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "AirTags Expose Dodgy Postal Industry (DHL Responds)" video.

@bazahaza individual delivery drivers pull this with just about every carrier... the better carriers will cease employing that particular delivery person the second time they try pulling that stunt of their own intitiative. Sometimes it's because your package actually couldn't be delivered for some non-standard reason so wasn't even in the van so you would have to go pick it up anyway, and the driver's boss decided this was the least problematic way to handle that, though. Some of the worse carriers actually actively encourage such nonsense with absurd quotas and caring about the metrics over the actual results.
8
I honestly would have been far more surprised if it was automated, though mostly because of the shear number of things that are still manually addressed. Even packages coming from companies with printed lables stuck on them, the lables still aren't consistently formated or positioned, and the packages themselves aren't standardized in size or shape. All of which makes it very difficult for a machine to correctly handle them.
2
@drayke8886 Importantly, while automated sorting is cheaper than manual sorting, Changing from one system to another is hugely expensive. And most of the expense is not the bits you'd expect, (yeah, sure, the machines cost whatever huge amount, but that's the Easy part).
1