What's going on with The Royal Mail?

Just remember kids, Tis the season for thousands of parcels and what suspiciously looks like greetings cards to go missing after the Xmas temps start at RM....
 
I'm waiting for a new coat. 3 days overdue now and out of stock. If it's lost I'm going to fume!


Just looking forward to posting on the new items thread really!

RM app still saying it'll be delivered today by 1pm!

Tracking says its only at the MC not even the DO! Why has it come up as being delivered today? What a disconnected system.
 
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LeeUK said:
Went down hill since Cameron and his chumps sold it off.
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Vince Cable was also part of those clowns.

RM was never going to succeed unless the regulator worked with them. Now we just have private investors, the regulator and the CWU union all butting heads running the company down.

It's amazing how a company with so many assets fails so miserably at even capitalising on easy opportunities.
 
The_Arbiter said:
Vince Cable was also part of those clowns.

RM was never going to succeed unless the regulator worked with them. Now we just have private investors, the regulator and the CWU union all butting heads running the company down.

It's amazing how a company with so many assets fails so miserably at even capitalising on easy opportunities.
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IIRC one of the issues is that over the last 30 years RM has been deliberately crippled in some ways to ensure that private companies could make a profit*, and then they gutted a lot of the experienced staffing, did away with things like the second delivery, and merged routes because "letter numbers are down, please ignore the increase in packages that mean the staff are carrying more" and because that then let them show an increase in profits just prior to it being sold off very cheaply to large investors.

It's also worth noting that RM by law have to accept pretty much any post that other companies decide they can't or don't want to deal with, so IIRC during the heavy and prolonged snows a few years back Yodel (I think it was) dumped much of their backlog onto RM with almost no notice so RM had to suddenly deal with millions of extra parcels.
From memory they managed surprisingly well, but that was before they had a lot of staffing cuts where they got rid of all the "slack" (AKA capacity to deal with staff illness or holidays etc).

*IIRC RM's pricing for post is based around: Collection, Sorting/distribution and Last mile. The first two used to subsidise the last mile because collecting say a million bills from the gas company every month was cheap and easy to distribute to the delivery offices where the expensive part was always actual delivery, but the likes of "Citipost" can do the first two parts and under cut what RM have to charge, then hand it over to RM who have to do the expensive part without the income from the cheaper bits.
 
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Werewolf said:
IIRC one of the issues is that over the last 30 years RM has been deliberately crippled in some ways to ensure that private companies could make a profit*, and then they gutted a lot of the experienced staffing,
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I worked there not long before the privatisation and then again for 4 yrs while covid was going on. But the profiting/crippling i've quoted is something i didn't know, and i'm not surprised if that's the case given what i saw/heard, but moreso how the general way things have been done in the country those past decades.

Even before the privatisation there was a lack of suitable staffing and cost cutting, as well as the nation wide bullying to get more out of staff. I expect pre 2000 (before i worked there), that there was little issues as a comparison to post 2000s.

I don't know if the way they've been operating these past decades has been a build up to some master plan of asset stripping, but it just seems more plausible to me that RM is just a case of incompetence over anything else. Positive business changes were and are amazingly slow. But with the newest share holders on board i guess it won't be long before the future direction of RM is unveiled.
 
I've always imagined the PO as a company stuck in the 1970's and one that does not accept the world as it is today.
 
Royal Mail are ****. I just received my workplace pension details in the post, opened the letter and tried to log into the website using the details included in the letter only to find that they're out of date and expired as the letter took 9 days to arrive. I foresee much ballache in my future trying to sort this out with the pension company.
 
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Government should relax obligation for them to be able to deliver every day to addresses, who really needs this - can that be efficiently delivered.
I wouldn't want to start paying PO a yearly delivery fee subscription like many pay to Amazon though.

just like to see a reduced postage fee for sending cards over Christmas - nice to send relations cards but the price of card+stamps adds up.
 
jpaul said:
Government should relax obligation for them to be able to deliver every day to addresses, who really needs this - can that be efficiently delivered.
I wouldn't want to start paying PO a yearly delivery fee subscription like many pay to Amazon though.

just like to see a reduced postage fee for sending cards over Christmas - nice to send relations cards but the price of card+stamps adds up.
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All sorts of people and there is no way to tell who and when.
As it is, at the moment if for example you get an urgent appointment from your doctor or hospital they know they should be able to contact you within a day or two at most by sending a letter, if you reduce the delivery days that goes to 3-5 with ease (they might be able to ring you with your new appointment, but many people don't think to update their phone number when they change it).

If you start to say "yeah you only need to deliver 3 days a week", or similar you hit the point where all sorts of companies, and government departments will need to start spending far more on deliveries as they'll have to use things like couriers who are both more expensive and far worse for the environment.
On the plus side think of all those courier driver jobs, and profits to the courier companies.

You would also likely need to significantly increase the size of pretty much every RM depot and delivery office in order to allow them the space to efficiently hold several times as much post as a matter of routine than they do now as many of the DO's are probably closer to capacity than they were 30 years ago due to things like increases in the size of the towns they serve, and the number of packages being delivered, and then probably have additional staff as they're more likely to deliver to a higher percentage of houses on each round, meaning you need to rework all the calcuations on the size of the rounds* and how long on average it takes.


*IIRC they already increased by a third a while back, and there was a big issue with the way they were calculated, from memory they used a software programme that didn't allow for things like the time taken to go down garden paths, open gates, or wait for people to open doors, and IIRC for vans it was done without taking into account week day traffic.
 
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I spoke to my postman just yesterday and he said that they were basically delivering every other day and that the union had given up on their dispute. I did not press him further.
 
Like everything which got privatised, the service got poor, staff laid off and prices went up. No money goes back in to it, only off-shore in to billionaire bank accounts.

Energy, water, trains, bin collections. All went to **** after they were sold off.
 
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I personally don't see an issue with delivering every other day.

Not sure where that would leave special delivery though.

I can't think of much that absolutely needs next day.

I'd rather an excellent 48hr service than a cruddy service in general
 
413x said:
I personally don't see an issue with delivering every other day.

Not sure where that would leave special delivery though.

I can't think of much that absolutely needs next day.

I'd rather an excellent 48hr service than a cruddy service in general
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They'll make a special trip, usually in a van, if there is a special delivery item. They did for me not long ago but then again my usual post doesn't come until around 1pm anyway so they must have been making sure.
 
I received a letter yesterday (Tuesday), dated 30th October, from the blood donation people, inviting me to donate......



.....yesterday or the day before.
 
RM could sell the Christmas stamps about a third cheaper and only can be used from Nov 20th til end of the year.

They would get more people using the service and definitely more to recoup the reduction in prices.
 

Delivery attempted 26 November​

Unfortunately, Royal Mail couldn't complete your delivery and is holding it for you to pick up. We're very sorry for the inconvenience.​


Been at home since Friday and will be for the next 6 weeks, checked front camera and video doorbell and not a trace of royal fail at all.
Not been any issues what-so-ever from Amazon and supermarket home deliveries, but then royal fail comes out with a complete lie and then informs Amazon I have to go to them, which due to recovering from ops is not possible.

I'd be happy to pay a higher percentage and never have to use them again!
 
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