Royal Mail frustrations
You've been using one of the newest forms of communication to comment on one of the oldest.
The man who runs the Royal Mail - Allan Leighton - was our big guest on Wednesday's programme.
And some Working Lunch viewers have been - er - stamping their feet in frustration over some of the things he said.
What really annoyed you was his suggestion that the delivery of mail hasn't suffered too much since the first and second deliveries were replaced by one single drop-off.
Robert Sharp was still waiting for his post to arrive while watching Working Lunch (and remember we're on an hour later on Wednesday!). Unfortunately, it's not a novel experience. He wrote, "my post turns up at any time of the day, sometimes as late as 6 pm."
Dick Thomas thought Mr Leighton was glossing over the issue a little. "Allan Leighton states that the mail is a little later to arrive; a few years ago the cut off time for town deliveries was 0930, it is now 1400, how can that be classed as a little later?" he asked.
Marilyn and Derek Spicer emailed, "we could hardly believe what we were hearing from Allan Leighton today. To hear him trying to sell the idea of an improved service is ludicrous. For ordinary postal users it is far from improved."
We had an interesting discussion in the Working Lunch office about the time your post arrives, and if you were really that bothered about it.
Some of the team argued that as the first post hardly ever arrived before people left for work anyway, a further delay would make no practical difference. You would still pick it up when you came back home in the evening.
And if you were not going to work and were likely to be at home for much of the day, the time the post arrived wasn't critical.
But others disagreed. Those of us who live in London or the south east of England might leave home at silly o'clock, but everywhere else the post used to arrive before you drove off to work. That doesn't happen any more, and your emails show it really annoys you.
It all boils down to economics - and value for money.
The early first delivery and later second post costs millions of pounds more each year than just one single delivery. That one change helped drag the Royal Mail from loss to profit.
And the second post wasn't just expensive; the Royal Mail argues it was also ineffective, delivering just a small proportion of the millions of cards and letters we send every week.
So we might feel an emotional attachment to it. We might resent the disruption to our old routines.
But do we really want things to go back to how they were? If we do - we might have to put our money where our mouths are, and pay more for it.
Comment number 1.
At 27th Nov 2008, mesmerizing commenter wrote:Unfortunately a lot of the blame has to be put on unhappy postal workers who, with their unions, are inflexible.
They see their older colleages retiring on a nice pension having had their hours limited along with the size of their post bag. Now they are losing these pensions and have to often carry large amounts of post, and they feel comparitively poorly done by.
My great uncle has been retired from the post office (he was a door to door postie) for nearly 35 years+. Hes always had a good pension, still going strong. He says he doesnt know what to do with the money, and "has to go on holiday every couple of months to spend it".
Now the world has changed and we are all feeling it, not just the post office workers.
One of the biggest issues locally I understand was that the door to door postman/women was allowed to do their round in 4 hours and offically their time was put in for the day. They could then go back to the sorting office and get paid for a second job for the other 4 hours! They already had a full days wage, and management thought they should come back it and work the rest without extra pay.
My post often comes every other day, sometimes like clockwork, no letters monday, letters tues, nothing wed, then letters thurs! One of the post office (store) workers told me often nothing comes from the sorting office for the day.
They don't even bother to update the day/time tag on the letter boxes here anymore. And I've caught twice my postman quietly trying to push "you were out" cards through my letter box that he'd written previously having left the bulky parcels down the road in his van!
With this kind of service it's not surprising the public are not supportive. Though some of the posties do a great job (curiously much better now the old bloke has been given a van and a women does my round).
What I can't understand is how 15 different private van delivery firms can make a profit driving huge miles between drops (and getting signatures). But the royal mail that visits every house every day can't make a profit?? Something is very wrong, they should wipe the floor with the van driving firms just through coverage and efficiencies of scale.
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