Royal Mail Rant

I've been waiting over 2 weeks for a small parcel to be delivered, it keeps bouncing between 2 local depots looking at the tracking, spoke to the seller and they've sent a replacement item out as they've never seen a parcel do that with RM before, lo and behold I was supposed to get the replacement delivered today according to RM tracking and that parcel has now done the same 'we sent your parcel to the wrong depot and have automatically recalled it' and is now going to a depot further away than my local delivery one.

So that's 2 parcels from the same seller (big online store) sent via tracked 24 & 48 both now going to bounce between delivery depots.
 
What the hell is going on with royal mail again. I sent a parcel back to talktalk returns with their tracked 48 hour label on the 10th July and it has been stuck at north west super hub for almost 2 weeks, took 5 days to even move at first from the post office. For a 48 hour service. Anyone else seeing this?


Tracking history

Thursday 16 July 2026
23:49
Item Received
North West Super Hub

Wednesday 15 July 2026
18:37
Item Received
Leeds MC

Friday 10 July 2026
16:25
Accepted at Parcelshop
Leeds Post Office
 
We got another two letters addressed to 31Cherrington rather than 31 Western delivered through our door. Either the sorting or delivery staff are unable to read or they are incompetent and unfit for the job.

We have complained numerous times, we have hand delivered post which is not ours many times also. We have put it back into the letter box. The people in Cherrington run a business or work from home one slightly hopes that the post office will cause them a loss of business for them to complain. It seems that they do not get our post?
 
Hagar said:
. It seems that they do not get our post?
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That's a common misconception, so it's unlikely they'll have your post. That's not to say, yours could go missing elsewhere. It'll lightly be due to the business messing about with changing addresses between rounds, so manual sorted stuff has increased chances of being miss sorted.

Complaining won't achieve anything. Writing to your MP every day has better odds of change. Pointing the finger at the regulators are the real people to blame imo.
 
The_Arbiter said:
That's a common misconception, so it's unlikely they'll have your post. That's not to say, yours could go missing elsewhere. It'll lightly be due to the business messing about with changing addresses between rounds, so manual sorted stuff has increased chances of being miss sorted.

Complaining won't achieve anything. Writing to your MP every day has better odds of change. Pointing the finger at the regulators are the real people to blame imo.
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What is it with not reading the customer address before stuffing the envelope through the letter box. We are on the same round, virtually around the corner in fact.
 
Hagar said:
What is it with not reading the customer address before stuffing the envelope through the letter box. We are on the same round, virtually around the corner in fact.
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Ask (or pay) to collect your mail instead if you've important stuff coming through. RM want letters to die, this will continue.
 
The_Arbiter said:
Ask (or pay) to collect your mail instead if you've important stuff coming through. RM want letters to die, this will continue.
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They want parcels to die too then as they can't even deliver a 48 hour parcel too that is still with them since the 10th July and stuck at hubs. It's become a bad joke all of it and nothing ever getting done about it. We give them stuff now and all they do is collect them at hubs and then dump them and send you a pack of stamps when you complain but item never gets delivered.

Nothing royal about this idiotic service now, nothing seems to work as it should anymore. Disgraceful..
 
Purgatory said:
They want parcels to die too then as they can't even deliver a 48 hour parcel too that is still with them since the 10th July and stuck at hubs. It's become a bad joke all of it and nothing ever getting done about it. We give them stuff now and all they do is collect them at hubs and then dump them and send you a pack of stamps when you complain but item never gets delivered.

Nothing royal about this idiotic service now, nothing seems to work as it should anymore. Disgraceful..
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It is the idiocracy coming to a street near you. There appears to be little pride in a good service.
 
get a parcel box, I bought one of the 70L garden plastic bins, put a little "parcel box" on it and that's been perfect. Everyone is happy to leave stuff in it, saves drivers time, saves me hassle.
 
There's pride but undeliverable (pardon the pun) expectations from the new overlords. Privatisation was never going to work - look at railways, energy, water and RM have gone the same way, but certain ideologies always think that it's the answer, when it's not.
But as always, it's left on the shoulders of the workers to deal with the ****** ideas from the higher ups who want a huge return on investment, rather than providing a good service, as doing that never makes them money.

I'm glad I left 3 years ago, but the boots on the ground staff, in any industry, bear the brunt of ineptitude and decisions being made that either are not sustainable or done without foresight.
 
Yeah, we've noticed RM parcels are shockingly behind the times and seem to have hit rock bottom..

Regular mail is perfect, our local postie is a nice chap and as our estate isn't too cramped, he gets an easy round so does it with a smile..

I will say that for 80%+ of deliveries our parcel box has been great.. I've got it sensor'd up so Home Assistant texts us if a Parcel or Letter arrives and we have a small display in the front room that shows the current status (which is reset when you retrieve the mail/parcel).

We still have a few parcels too big for it (although we did get the largest we could find that wasn't just a bin: https://www.smartparcelbox.co.uk/extra-large-slanted-top-front-access-black-smart-parcel-box.html) and still have the odd moron throwing a parcel over a fence..
 
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Ordered some Nutri-Paw tablets for the dog on Sunday and delivered yesterday by Royal Mail (Around 5.15pm as well) as promised, no issue with their service round here but I don't know if it's lack of post or if they are indeed holding mail back as I always seem to get a couple of letters at a time.
 
Hagar said:
What is it with not reading the customer address before stuffing the envelope through the letter box. We are on the same round, virtually around the corner in fact.
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It might be your #31 and the other #31 have letter slots in the route delivery frame, one above the other, under time pressure (which I believe has got worse since I left a few years ago) some letters are being placed in the wrong slot. Then under pressure to get delivered on time, again which I believe is a lot harder than when I last delivered in '22, the postie(s) are flicking through the letter bundle while walking instead of stopping as they are supposed to and simply grabbing all the letters marked 31 and not realising some are for another road.

In my experience, right number but wrong road errors were the most common.
 
Our parcel deliveries have finally gotten a bit better with RM, not had any 5pm Sunday items (that typically should have been Saturday ones, or even Friday) for a few months after about a year or two of half the packages arriving at gone 5pm by a guy from another depot often in a rented van*.

Our letters seem to be a bit more hit and miss, but we also no longer seem to have a regular guy, I think I've counted around 6 different people since our regular guy left deliveries/retired just after Christmas (IIRC bad knees**), it feels like the delivery person is changing at random as we'll get one guy for a couple of weeks, then a young lass for a few days, then a second guy for a week, then someone else.


*It got to the point where I was hoping for a Yodel delivery over RM parcels, as I had an urgent order for shoes for my dad spend about a week bouncing back and forth between 4 different depots (I wish I'd screenshotted the tracking, it had about 18 hops, many repeat visits), and packages were arriving at random.

**Definitely not related to his work...(I had an uncle who had to give up being a postie due to knees and RM denied it was anything to do with work, and IIRC one of our other posties retired and mentioned that RM were denying his knee problems were work related...)
 
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