Royal Mail are Shocked

maltrab

maltrab

Administrator
Staff member
That we are sending less letters and they are loosing money,what did they expect to happen, email came along what do they do, they put the prices up and up, so folk send more emails, even greeting cards electronically.
Even businesses send what used to be sent in the post electronically these days and many companies have encouraged us to go paperless
 
The Post Office in the Centre of Newcastle closed years ago and a Post Office Service is now provided in WH Smith and a private Newsagents . There were twelve counters at W H Smith now there are two and 4 self service scanning tills which shows the reduction in people sending letters and it is only buoyed by people sending parcels back .
 
Thank goodness there are still some small-town staffed post office counters remaining in the UK. I usually buy calendars and post cards as souvenirs and gifts, but have to mail them home because of lack of space in my luggage. They fill a fairly large, thick envelope, which requires a customs declaration on the outside, and I send it airmail so it will take less than six weeks to arrive. That also eliminates the possibility of it arriving looking as though it had been knocking around in a ship's bilge. After that happened, I gave up on surface mail. The transaction requires interaction with a human postal clerk.
 
With many bank closing in town centres, the post offices are now picking up the customers who's nearest bank is some miles away
 
The post office will never return to its former position, it didnt help going private and the two tier postage idea made posting a letter a bit of a nightmare, the fact they are looking for ex police men to work for them due to the high number of letters being opened by thieves within the company isnt encouraging. Ferrybridge had a mailing post office station and stables for the London to Glasgow stagecoach, but when it came down to money they closed it down, money talks, history doesnt.
 
billyd601 said:
The post office will never return to its former position, it didnt help going private and the two tier postage idea made posting a letter a bit of a nightmare, the fact they are looking for ex police men to work for them due to the high number of letters being opened by thieves within the company isnt encouraging. Ferrybridge had a mailing post office station and stables for the London to Glasgow stagecoach, but when it came down to money they closed it down, money talks, history doesnt.
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In fact Billy there are several tiers to posting letters these days, depending on size and thickness, along with deciding 1st or 2nd class, then recorded delivery,and if it valuable special delivery, even special delivery has three tiers, next day before 9am, next working day but extra if you are sending on a Friday and want it there by Saturday
 
I remember a few years ago sending a birthday card to my brother in law who only lives 5 miles away, it must have been a bit on the large size and one stamp so they wouldnt deliver it, he was informed he had some "post" and had to get a taxi or a bus down to the depot for his card! He wasnt well pleased at all.
 
The demise of the Post Office is perhaps shown by the disappearance of one of its prominent figures . On TV constantly appears work dried up and I don't believe he is on any longer certainly on mainstream TV or indeed in Scotland where he was a big hit with the Gaelic community

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When my dad's post office closed 3 years ago they blamed the lack of customers. They opened another one about a mile away in a local off licence. My brother went to school with the man that ran the small so I knew him well, he said they wanted him to open 7 days a week but he had to pay electric and so on so if he only sold one stamp on a Sunday it would cost him a fortune to run, that's why they want shops to take over the post offices because they can sustain the business better.
Postage is so unreliable, I've posted letter for Fort George in the Scottish Highlands at 4pm and they've arrived in the East Midlands at 7am the following day but a few weeks later posted a card destined to go 10 miles and it took a week! To make it worse, I live at 159 I keep getting letters and parcels for 159 in 2 streets away! It's been happening for months.
 
Pearl said:
To make it worse, I live at 159 I keep getting letters and parcels for 159 in 2 streets away! It's been happening for months.
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I live at 136 and for years after I moved here, I received mail for #136 any street in the village, and I would often receive my mail days late with a handwritten note on it saying "NOT 136" one of the other streets. After my credit card bill didn't arrive at all, I reported the problem to the local Postmaster, but he just shrugged and said "People put mail out for re-delivery." He didn't react at all when I pointed out that apparently not everyone did and that this carelessness in sorting was laying postal customers open to account hacking. This was back in the old days when the credit card number was printed on the bill in full. There had also been some mail from my bank that had been opened before being put out for re-delivery, and it had my account number printed on it in full.

My accounts were never misused, so whoever received those financial documents apparently didn't use the information. The problem hasn't recurred since that Postmaster retired and a new one took over about ten years ago.
 
A chap I worked with lived in a little Village called Twice Brewed where they ran the local shop and Post Office and it gave him the biggest headache he had ever faced . They supplied the Times Newspaper to the Queen's Cousin one of the Bowes-Lyon family and she did not pay her bill for some considerable time . Unfortunately it fell to my work colleague to tell her they were stopping her paper unless she payed up in full . As I recall she did not and they carried out their threat.
 
Post offices here are going the same way but opposite:13:
Yes mail delivery problems remain the same but they have now made Post Offices a "one stop shop" for paying government bills etc.
You pay your Driver's Licence, Vehicle Licence, Electricity Bill, Water Bill, Shire Rates etc etc etc etc.. PLUS they also take payment for private companies like Insurance and many other bills.
The Post Offices are nearly always full of customers (In major centers anyway.. in small country towns it isn't so bad) queuing up in long lines and taking forever to be served because there are no extra staff to handle the new processes, and very few are people actually buying a stamp or posting anything!!!! :02::02::02:
 
Brian Johns said:
Post offices here are going the same way but opposite:13:
Yes mail delivery problems remain the same but they have now made Post Offices a "one stop shop" for paying government bills etc.
You pay your Driver's Licence, Vehicle Licence, Electricity Bill, Water Bill, Shire Rates etc etc etc etc.. PLUS they also take payment for private companies like Insurance and many other bills.
The Post Offices are nearly always full of customers (In major centers anyway.. in small country towns it isn't so bad) queuing up in long lines and taking forever to be served because there are no extra staff to handle the new processes, and very few are people actually buying a stamp or posting anything!!!! :02::02::02:
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They have been doing that here for years. You can pay for all sorts of bills etc. over the counter. The post office used to be the postal service and the phones until 1987 when they split. I remember as a very young kid going into the same building but into a different part to pay the phone bill. When they split Telecom (as they were called then) opened up a shop in another part of town where you could pay your bills, buy phones for your house etc. When Telecom literally shut the shop you went to the Post Shop to pay your Telecom bill which you can still do.
 
I think the only reason the post offices have survived this long is because we could pay our bills there, gas, electricity, car tax, phone, water, council tax. As well as pick up child allowance, pension and benefits. A friend in American was shocked we can money from our post offices.
 
Pearl said:
I think the only reason the post offices have survived this long is because we could pay our bills there, gas, electricity, car tax, phone, water, council tax. As well as pick up child allowance, pension and benefits. A friend in American was shocked we can money from our post offices.
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The PO here charge you a % to pay bills :( Cash or card which I think is pretty rough as with some bills its the only way to pay em (except the dodgy automated pay gig).
 
Bill payment over the counter was severely hit by the advent of the Direct Debit system and more recently probably even harder by online banking and bank transfer.
 
captain clutterbuck said:
Bill payment over the counter was severely hit by the advent of the Direct Debit system and more recently probably even harder by online banking and bank transfer.
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People just go with what's easy, my dad was totally lost when they asked him to pay his tax online! My brother rang and told them he's 84, disabled and thinks online means hanging washing out, they finally have an address to send a cheque too.
 
Pearl said:
send a cheque
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How long will Gregory Pecks be available? You have to wonder , given that so many people don't even carry cash now they just flash their card at a reader and waltz off with their purchase . Some get really shirty when the contactless isn't working and they have to spend a full 10 seconds putting their card in the machine and typing in their pin you can see the frustration on their faces .
 
Not many places take them now, dad had a big purchase the other week and I had to use my card and then pay myself back with one of dad's cheques, it's a right palava but dad can't do cards and they wouldn't take a cheque.
 
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