I missed it today.
I never get anything very interesting in the post. Bills, junk mail, a load of baby catalogues I never managed to get off the mailing list for, plenty of “To The Householder” letters. If I’m lucky, a parcel containing something I probably shouldn’t have purchased. Even so, when the post hits the mat (later and later in the day, these days…) it’s a welcome sound, a bit of excitement.
Today there is no delivery, however, and deliveries have been suspended for a week while two 48-hour walk outs by postal staff follow in quick succession. In practise, I can’t see things getting back to normal again for at least three weeks.
It’s irritating – an inconvenience. I’m waiting for some yarn from the US to arrive, I had to send my niece’s birthday present by special delivery to get there in time as I heard about the strike too late for proper contingency planning. Annoying, but nothing serious. But I know others, desperately waiting for an important cheque, trying to send stuff to ill relatives, or book something important that this is more than a mere inconvenience for.
I do have sympathy for the workers and I also have sympathy for the employers – from all accounts, Royal Mail just isn’t profitable and they’re struggling. Post Offices all over the country are closing because they’re losing money – a shocking situation when you consider how much of a community lifeline a post office is in many rural and hence unprofitable locations.
The inescapable question is, why was the Royal Mail ever privatised? We’re told that a privatised company is much more efficient than a government owned service, but how can that be true when we used to have an enviable postal system with two deliveries a day, first class used to mean something and buying insurance in case the parcel got lost was actually much less of a necessity?
What I, and many others this week, have discovered is that there is no genuine competition for the Royal Mail. Couriers are much more expensive, inconvenient and don’t deliver as quickly unless you pay silly money. For letter post, sure I could send an email, but there are many things you can’t use email for. The Royal Mail is a monopoly to all intents and purposes. Even if you could get viable competition, how wasteful would it be to have several letter deliveries from different companies throughout the day? And having so many different collection points for different companies dotted around, with (presumably) different stamp systems – because door-to-door collection of letter post would be completely cost-prohibitive as we can already see with courier post now.
So, the solution isn’t to give in to all the workers’ demands, or even to allow the Royal Mail to make the changes and hike up the prices to be more more profitable. I think the only sensible solution is for the government to buy it back.
Any party willing to make that promise?
17 responses so far ↓
1 Siani // 5th Oct 2007 at 2:58 pm
Great post, Pewari – and I agree wholeheartedly. My local post office closed a couple of years ago, but being within a stone’s throw of the city centre, it wasn’t such a hardship for me, as there are at least four others within walking distance. However, the elderly and disabled living locally have been severely hit by this closure. The mail service certainly fell apart when everything was privatised. And just look at the rail industry and all the safety issues and fatal accidents that arose, after privatisation. Thank you, Mrs. Thatcher!
2 Claire P // 5th Oct 2007 at 3:32 pm
Hi Pewari, I usually lurk around reading your excellent blog (through Turquoise Lisa) but feel compelled to put fingers to keys to let you know that I completely agree with you on this point. The Royal Mail service is a complete shambles (and has been since privatisation) and no-one really seems to care very much. We used to know our Postie by name, now they seem to change daily!
3 ian // 5th Oct 2007 at 5:02 pm
Has the Post Office been privatised?
If you want a local post office in an unprofitable location, then it should be subsidised from local taxation. Stand for your local council on the grounds of increased council tax to pay for it.
4 Pewari // 5th Oct 2007 at 5:23 pm
I originally had subsidised local post offices as a suggested solution in the post, but then removed it as I feel it still doesn’t solve the fundamental problem: having a privatised non-monopoly postal service is incredibly wasteful by constant duplication of deliveries and collection points. In an age of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle it all seems rather pointless…
5 SeaBird // 5th Oct 2007 at 6:27 pm
Wow – I can’t imgine the havoc wreaked if the post office stopped delivering mail! Even though rates keep going up and up, it’s still the best deal going!
6 Paula // 5th Oct 2007 at 10:38 pm
Last time the strikes were on we ended up with no income for a considerable time due to hold ups in documents arriving. So thanks to the added stresses in a very trying time I am afraid I have no sympathy now for the posties. There are too many people who rely on the post for important mail to get through.
7 Aileni Noyle // 6th Oct 2007 at 7:26 am
They call it progress, Pewari. Siani put the right name in play – Thatcher.
Another thing I am glad to have left behind, but there will be a knock-on effect over here.
A,
8 Elle // 6th Oct 2007 at 4:28 pm
Royal Mail is privatised but every share is owned by….the government! There was some talk of bringing in shares for employees as part of a profitability bonus scheme but that was shelved.
Want to know why Royal mail is failing? It’s outdated, out-moded and we have a free market in the UK brought into effect 4 years ago now(you may have noticed that some of the business mail you get no longer has a Royal Mail business mark on it). A lot of Royal Mail’s revenue comes through business services and as there is now an open market out there many of their competitors can provide a much cheaper service which means RM is losing money.
Royal Mail is trying to hit targets and keep within a very tight budget as set by the government…and it’s not working. It’ll get worse before it gets better.
And how do I know all this? Until very recently I used to work for them.
9 Elle // 6th Oct 2007 at 4:38 pm
Actually Pewari, having read your comment above I’d just like to further explain there is no longer a monopoly on postal services. This ended 4 years ago and came through as a directive via Brussells. It’s because of the internal UK competitive market, and the fact that many of these companies are taking large business contracts from RM, that RM is struggling. If they lose revenue from one place they have to make it up from another which is seen as poor pay rises and hiked postage costs. As I’ve already stated RM is privatised but all shares are owned by the government. Many of the small post offices that have been referred to have been franchises. They’ve often had to close because they haven’t had enough local business to keep the franchise (which is very expensive) going.
And as ridiculous as it might sound, email and text messages have had an impact. RM still deals with 10 million letters a day but a large proportion of this is business related.
Sorry, I seem to be writing a tome in your comments. I should have just written a post of my own :)
10 Pewari // 6th Oct 2007 at 4:41 pm
LOL, no feel free to tome-write, I’m finding it very interesting. So what, in your opinion, would it take to sort RM out and make it an enviable service worldwide again?
11 Alley Katt // 7th Oct 2007 at 4:25 pm
I was saying to my brother and wife, how many people are going to lose their homes because of this? Howmany small businesses are going to go bankrupt because of payments that won’t make it in the post?
It is totally unfair that they have effectively shut down the postal service for a week! They say that it is two forty-eight hour strikes, but Sunday is in there, and there is no post on a Sunday!
Also, I am waiting for tickets for Within Temptation.
12 GoodTwin // 8th Oct 2007 at 12:07 pm
I assume the making it 2×48 hour strikes are because of a legal restriction, in which case there should be a law making them illegal within 7 days of each other (or something like that) because we know just how long cranking back up that size of company takes.
RM don’t charge their competitors enough to deliver their mail. No other company has the size of infrastructure of RM; if they were doing their own deliveries they would have to charge more.
It’s a far cry from when my grandparents were courting, back in the 20s. In the days before telephones were common, my Grandpa could post a postcard in the morning saying “we’ll meet at 7″ and it would be delivered a few miles away in the afternoon, in time for my Nan to come home from work and go out to meet him. Those were the days…
13 Alley Katt // 8th Oct 2007 at 12:13 pm
GoodTwin: It is not that far from when we could do that anyway. I remember sending a letter to a friend when I was a kid. I got a letter from a friend at first post at about 7ish, I replied and got it in the post box by 8ish, and they had the reply in the second post.
Now you are lucky if you get to something the same week a when you post it.
14 Ys // 8th Oct 2007 at 12:17 pm
I totally agree! Royal Mail has gone very quickly downhill. Like you, my post is delivered later and later every day. The most shocking of all is that I get told to wait 10 DAYS for a First Class letter to arrive at its destination! I’m worried my local post office is going to be shut down as well. The local postmistress is lovely and always stops to talk to everyone in the queue.
I just can’t see how they’re going to fix things. I worry there’ll just be more and more strikes.
15 Alley Katt // 8th Oct 2007 at 12:23 pm
Do you live near me then Ys? :) My local postmaster and postmistress are two of the loveliest people I have met. We moved from this area 11 years ago when my son was born, and when we moved back in August, they recognised me instantly.
16 Pewari // 8th Oct 2007 at 3:37 pm
In some ways, you can almost understand them closing down the small community post offices… don’t condone it, but at least can understand the business reasons.
But our MAIN post office is closing and moving into WHSmith. The same WHSmith that has a queue out the door and down the street every weekend because they can’t cope with the amount of customers who want to buy a paper.
It’s going to be chaos.
17 GoodTwin // 9th Oct 2007 at 12:03 pm
The same thing is happening to our main post office. I’ve never been to the post office without having to queue for at least ten minutes (usually in the region of 30) and the queues in WHS, while not extreme, are certainly longer than I wait for most things hence I rarely shop there.
The views expressed in these comments are not the views of the publisher. However, we believe in the rights of others to express their legitimate views and concerns. Any legitimate complaint emailed to pewari@may.be will be seriously considered and the post reviewed as desirable and necessary.
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