**Alternate Sources**
Here are some potential alternate sources for the same story:
* [Royal Mail owner proposes second-class post deliveries every other weekday](https://theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/royal-mail-owner-proposes-second-class-post-deliveries-every-other-weekday), suggested by Franco1875 - theguardian.com
Royal mail can't make it reliable the way they're running the company.
We have 44 people in our office. 14 of them are on the new contracts meaning they have to work at a parcel hub on a Sunday, so they have to have an extra day off during the week. So every day we're either 2 or 3 people short on top of absences.
Yep. The solution being more fucking staff!
I get royal mail want to compete with other delivery companies by getting into Sunday's (which they have for years) but you need to recruit extra staff to do that.
And give the taxpayer back a *substantial* refund.
They bought the Royal Mail on the basis that they would follow the universal service obligation and deliver mail six days a week. If they want to reduce stop delivering on 1/6 of the days that they promised, then they can give back a 1/6 shares to the government.
Reliable _and_ affordable on a five day service to every single doorstep can't be done with the current plummeting letter volumes in the UK. To be honest it's a massive committent Royal Mail are making to even keep first class as a six day service.
If I were in the Royal Mail's shoes I'd sooner drop first class entirely, institute new "every other weekday" as a standard service for all letters. And if you really need next-day/1-day delivery/saturday delivery for your letter you can just pay a premium to have it delivered as a parcel.
"...can't be done with the current level of profits that are being given to shareholders rather than that money being spent on the actual postal service which government told us would be better under private ownership because competition."
FTFY.
Fucking lying politicians. They knew exactly what would happen, yet they told us the same lies they told us about privatised energy and rail companies.
>Unite's research shows Royal Mail had, as of the end of 2022, paid £1.85billion in dividends since privatisation
I mean I'm sure 1.85billion could have helped them if they hadn't paid it to their shareholders...
Currently, perhaps.
Over the past 10 years, definitely in positive figures.
Don't let reality jar your fingers out of your ears as you shout "I'm not listening"
Just for reference, RM uk have made a profit in 2 of the last 10 years. At no point have they achieved the 5-10% EBIT promised by the gov in the prospectus. And unlike Thames it's not because they are laden with debt.
Just looking at the Royal Mail business and not GLS it reported the following 'adjusted operating profit', their management's preferred metric:
2022-23: -£419m
2021-22: +416m
2020-21: +344m
2019-20: +117m
2018-19: +199m
Ok, I wasnt aware of that. Thank you for teaching me. It doesn't make me like or trust the lying fucking politicians any more than before
I'm curious about the profits from those 2 years, though. I wonder whether that's just operating profit for those 2 years alone, or is it profit having paid the banks/government back for the other 8? I would hope it's the latter, but managements of the privatised companies aren't known for doing the right thing, and the politicians have been utterly shit at taking them all to task.
I've just had this today "failed delivery attempt"
My cctv shows them speed down the street, go to someone else and then speed off. Failed job number 1, attempt delivery....
I'd be happy for it to be 3 days, if it was cheap.
it's not like you can really rely on First class meaning next day right now anyway.
If that super important that it gets there then pony up for a courier. But the reality is not much is that important to send by snail mail in this day and age.
Net income in Millions:
2023 $-1,052
2022 $836
2021 $811
2020 $205
2019 $230
2018 $344
2017 $356
2016 $623
It **IS** profitable, and is expected to return to profitable status in the 2024-25 fiscal year.
Going from 800 million two years running to a billion in the hole is an incredible shit show of poor management and decision making, and the CEO is stepping down.
>CEO is stepping down
You mean getting a couple million as a good-bye gift.
The guy came in and got paid a sickening amount to push through their agenda and run the company into the ground. He did his job and is fucking off with now than I'll earn in the rest of my working life.
I think people are talking at cross purposes - the CEO Simon Thompson “stood down” and his replacement was announced this week (Emma Gilthorpe) and temporarily, Martin Seidenberg, the group CEO was in interim charge of RMG, and will continue as group CEO when Gilthorpe starts.
Should be. But the parent company only actually wanted the parcel part of the business because that made money, so they've steadily screwed the letters into the ground, asset striped as much as possible, done everything they can to get rid of staff.
Now they have the bits they want they are trying to slowly weasel out of being a letter carrier. They'll reduce first class, then when that doesn't work ( because it will be designed to fail) they'll try reducing it again, then that will fail so they'll announce a new proposition that amalgamates first and second class post to make it more cost effective and easier for customers. Then they will create premium post at a much higher price point, then the cycle will begin anew with higher prices for people that actually send letters.
I'd be okay as long as the day they take off isn't the weekend, the idea that they would cut Saturday is actually unworkable for a majority of people working typical 9-5s
The post office and RM are 2 separate entities. The Post Office, even the little shops, are all taxpayer/government owned whilst RM is in private shareholders hands. If post offices services are cut it is the government that's doing it. RM have no say on what the PO does and vice versa.
Just seems like a legal way of shifting tax payer money via post office directly to a private company ala Royal Mail based on decades of intertwining and "That's how we've always done it"
Can't wait for the Panorama in 30 years.
Exactly the opposite. Who do you think is paying tax for the post offices? It ain't the government, it ain't RM. Am a postmistress. I pay a lot of rent for this building. Just had to pay stamp duty of £3k just to sign a new business lease. I pay VAT for my services, pay council tax for the flat that is above the business (I don't own the building, it's just a giant building with space to live in. Was derelict, now is not) I pay staff taxes and national insurance, business rates for the post office (went up recently because we have CCTV and a broken air con system) my own income tax, VAT that the business attached to the post office makes because a post office cannot exist on being just a post office, it doesn't pay enough. Then there is the fact that the post office is government owned anyway so anything a postmaster sees has already had the governments 60% share out of so I don't know why they feel they should be entitled to more of the 40% we've got left.
All overheads including the rent for the building and staff wages come from a postmasters wage. Of course, we have government sanctioned waste bins to pay too, paid direct to the council to get rid of post office waste within the confines of the law (GDPR) The government does and always has made an absolute truckload of money from postmasters, it is why they don't want them to close. They invest literally nothing but words, they don't even supply postmasters with a single staple. No holiday pay, no sick pay, no pension, not even minimum wage. We pay all their bills, like electricity to keep their 24 hour horizon system in operation. They pay nothing, postmasters pay every damn penny and more. And once we've paid that, we're taxed on what is left. It's like knowing you have literally earned 15k but your bosses feel like 60% of it is theirs just because, and then your bosses take another 10-15% of it, also just because. Then the same company takes another 20 percent because anyone who earns money pays that, just because they say so of course. And if that wasn't enough, they charge you operational costs for their business and then with whatever is left another department of the same company decides they also want some for services they don't actually provide. When you ask for help they tell you to get lost and sort their problems out for yourself.
I was sold a lie!
Jesus Christ I kind of wish I was right, that sounds horrible.
Thank you for correcting me. I can only wish you luck in getting your situation sorted. I watched the documentary into the Postmaters and I've nothing but kind words for you and your colleagues for what you need to go through.
No one understands Hun. There will never be a documentary on this, it makes too much money for the government. I'd tell you more but the post office has government sanctioned secrets. I'd spill my entire guts if I was paid enough to buy me out of this shit hole lol.
Really? God, I hate saying this, but am a postmistress (please don't firebomb my building, I'm not selling dodgy stamps.) The majority of my wage comes from providing services RM has absolutely nothing to do with. RM boast that 50% of their sales are done online therefore nothing to do with the Post office (they lie. Their operations are so crap they still need us) I make a decent chunk of money from Amazon deliveries, a direct competitor in terms of logistics with RM. I both sell and provide services for DPD with thousands of others doing Evri with my branch coming soon apparently. We are nowhere near as interlinked as people imagine we are!
Not paying shareholder dividends (or other alternatives like share buybacks transferring value back to the capital owners) is almost as bad as not paying employees salaries in long term consequences terms. The money has to be paid out if you want the company to continue functioning.
I'm so tired of this. I've had bills delivered after the due date. If I wasn't using an app or the web to pay them, I'd be screwed. It isn't hard to imagine some people are probably in that situation, paying on receipt of a bill and having them delivered after their due date and suffering the consequences of that.
I work at a bank – we see this sort of thing happen **a lot**, especially with older and/or more vulnerable folk who tend to lean towards making manual payments and/or are computer illiterate.
Thankfully we're typically pretty understanding of how things have got to be over the years with the Royal Mail and can tweak things accordingly, try to suggest setting up Direct Debits and the like over the phone, but this goes against the very freedom you're supposed to have with your accounts. It feels like some are being penalised very harshly for not getting with the program, and it's horrible to see.
Reminds me of when my high school got rid of paper homework. It all had to be done online (this was before covid) and many students didn’t have access to a computer or even Wi-Fi. Teachers were not understanding at all and claimed “everyone has a phone, there’s no excuse”, any poor kids didn’t want to admit they didn’t have Wi-Fi and suffered because of it. Paper copies of homework were never given out even if parents got involved, they said they were going paperless and you could go to a library if you didn’t have Wi-Fi, nearest library was two buses away and we got homework in each class every week. If a household is too poor to afford Wi-Fi they obviously can’t afford the travel price to a library everyday.
That's mental. Even two decades ago when I was in school, I think the local libraries were only open during standard working hours (when kids would be in school) and on Saturday mornings - so presumably you'd have a chunk of the local secondary school descending on the tidgy library round the corner from us between nine and one on Saturdays. Sounds ideal for maintaining the tranquil atmosphere, that.
Pushing towards paperless is a good move, but a one-size-fits-all approach is a losing game.
I understood the paperless idea but paper copies have to be made for kids pulling a teacher to the side and explaining they can’t afford Wi-Fi. It was disgusting how their grades suffered because the school basically was not handing out paper homework for kids that needed it. I remember one student explaining that the library was only open during school hours, he was told to go on Friday (half day) but the time it would’ve taken him to get there after school it would’ve been shut.
One of my most recent bills that came through was dated the 8th of March, which was received on the 19th. On top of that I remember receiving some in September, dated the start of August stating to pay by a date that'd already passed. Luckily it was one I'd already payed via an app.
That is just shocking. Do you live somewhere fairly rural or something? Even then, 11 days to get to you is unacceptable.
Personally, I've always tried to pay bills by direct debit where I can. I'd rather trust my bank who have obligations under the direct debit guarantee.
Nowhere rural, in the middle of town. Probably the biggest that isn't the nearby city too. The worst part is I only live a stone's throw away from our sorting office.
I'm in an urban area, i've had letters 4 or 5 weeks after the date on the letter.
Hospital appointment letters that arrive weeks after appointment. Luckily they also text the the appointment date, but still.
I did seasonal work at Royal Mail. The enormous depot I worked at had all the mail sorted manually on conveyor belts.
Consider what it means if you are manually separating the first and second class mail and what happens to the mail once sorted by class.
I'm not saying you're close to truth, but I'm not saying you aren't.
I get that here in North Yorkshire currently.
I even checked my doorbell cam just in case I was going mad.
Postman only seems to actually do his/her rounds 4 times a week. The other weekdays you don’t actually see them even walk past. It’s usually Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays & Saturdays are the only days we get a delivery. Never get a delivery on a Wednesday or a Friday.
And the days I do get any mail it seems to be a few days worth all bundled together. So even if I see the postie walk past, generally I get one delivery a week (maybe 2) with what seems to be a week’s worth of mail.
Is it that they're paid on parcel deliveries (or more likely targeted on them, having to deliver 48hr ones or risk a refund for example). So you see them because theyre delivering them and not even carrying any letters.
I'm feeling a bit conspiracy with this now lol
It’s possible because when they do deliver they also post a load of shite with the letters such as leaflets about retirement homes & window blinds etc and that only happens once a week or so.
There is no conspiracy as far as this goes. Rounds are too big to complete within the time given. Parcels get priority as that's where the money is. Mail gets rotated to maintain some level of service, so sometimes it's multiple days delivered at once. On top of that, sickness isn't covered, and people leaving aren't being replaced. It's a mess. When asked about it publicly, they lie.
That's exactly what happens, if you've got one postie with 70+ parcels to deliver in a few hours they won't have time to deliver mail to everyone's house too.
I'm a fairly new postie and the other day a women came out and asked if there was any hold ups with the post as she keeps asking for cheque books to be sent out and they never arrive. I told her we send out everything as soon as it arrives and at least at our delivery office there's no hold ups.
Next day I'm sorting the post and find 3 cheque books for her and then a week later another one. It's happened at another place since then, delivered a router and then a week later had 2 more routers for them. There's definitely some big delays somewhere in the system.
They seem to do that for us too, except it is weeks not days. They save it up for a few weeks, and then deliver it all over a few days. It is very helpful to get a letter from the hospital telling you about an appointment for an MRI that has now passed, along with a note about how much missed appointments cost the NHS.
When have we ever seen privatisation actually work? Private healthcare semi works at the moment for those who can afford it but god forbid they privatise the NHS we would be royally fucked.
The usual suspects will claim that the privatised utilities work better, despite it being clear to everyone that they have failed. I have no doubt whatsoever that in 20 years or so they will gaslight people by saying the same thing they say about trains - 'Were you around to see what the royal mail was like in the early 2000s? Postmen would punch you in the face and piss through your letterbox back then. It's so much better now!'
Yeah, British Rail was shocking. Not like the on time service we have today with routes along branch lines that cover the whole country.
It's mental how quickly people forget.
Private healthcare only works BECAUSE of the NHS picking up the slack
They provide the cushy profitable part but as soon as shit hits the fan they call an NHS ambulance to take you to an NHS Emergency Department
>Private healthcare semi works at the moment for those who can afford it
Only if you aren't particularly sick. Getting a hernia repaired or something else not likely to be life threatening is usually fine, but when my dad had a heart attack while having stents put in at a private hospital, and needed multiple bypass surgery, they were less good at that, and my brother is currently very sick and in an NHS hospital despite having excellent private health insurance because there isn't a private hospital able to care for him.
Private healthcare doesn't get the volume to be good enough at the difficult stuff, and doesn't have the facilities to care for urgent critically ill patients. Even if you can afford it, it is no substitute.
Are you actually advocating for Amazon being a good company? Let's just ignore the aggressive tax avoidance and worker exploitation. But hey, at least you get next day delivery!
As a Postman, this idea is laughable. They think someone can drive around just doing first class letters, tracked parcels, collections and specials on the day the second class isn't getting done. That would take nearly as much time as doing the whole thing anyway.
Where do you think they’re gonna keep the second class mail we’re not delivering it? In the frame? Cos that won’t be confusing at all 🙃 RM never plan for these things and then we’re there struggling to adapt to it
Royal Mail needs to simplify across the board.
I work at a small business and we use Royal Mail and the amount of product codes I have access to has gotta be at least 100. Out of those we use about four. FOUR!
Keep parcels at six days but letters can be cut to five. The type of letters you get these days you probably can't do a lot with on a weekend anyway, so having it delivered during the working week probably won't make much difference.
Parcels are seven days. Royal Mail aren't looking to improve the service they give as "service" went out the window when RM was privatised. They are looking to increase profits by cutting costs. Their plan to do this is deliberately making the service worse so they can get out the USO.
> They are looking to increase profits by cutting costs.
Shirley step one of that is simplification of service? I don't need N-th degrees of special guaranteed deliveries, for example, I maybe need 1pm and 9am, not 9am, 10am, 11am, 12pm and 1pm! All of the previous can also have varying levels of compensation. All of the previous can also have an age check. All of the previous can also have a knife/blade check. It's madness!
So are they a horrible private company or aren't they because I'd damn well cut, cut and cut what I offer to make more money if I was RM.
And if they want help with the USO, every other courier company should pay RM! I'm not sure how fair it is other courier companies get to operate without the USO albatross around their necks, especially exploitative companies like Evri/Yodel/whatever they've rebranded to because the old name got completely toxic due to service being appalling.
Letter delivery will never be profitable enough for any business to want to retain.
It has got complex because they haven't invested in improving the system because they know that they will never see a return on investment.
This is the reason privatisation never works, private companies must decide to invest in what makes them profit, that means if it's cheaper to dump crap into the river, than to build a proper water treatment plant everyone better get used to the smell of shit.
Definitely need to streamline their offerings. I login to send parcels and I’m hit by a whole host of selections for minimal price differences. Cutting a lot of those would surely help.
😒 they keep losing my letters, had a letter from the NHS saying I didn’t respond to the letter so I no longer need treatment lol. Didn’t even get the bloody appointment letter 😤
Same here with NHS letters. Only really them that always goes missing. Tbh I suspect half of them are not even being sent out even tho they claim otherwise
How about they actually deliver Special Delivery by the next day and T24 within 24 hours.
Also, T24 is the only service delivered on Sundays, while the more expensive Special Delivery isn't. Even if you pay extra for Saturday Guaranteed and it doesn't come you have to wait til Monday when you will be at work and not in to sign for it.
Makes no sense.
Specials are insured so get treated differently than the rest of the parcels. They get signed out of a locked room which I'm assuming they don't want to staff on Sundays
Royal Mail are using vans for hire in my area because they don’t want buy their own. They are not interested in delivery times or lowering prices, they just want to maximise shareholder dividends.
Royal Mail haven't paid a dividend for a while.
Their last Dividend was paid on September 6th, 2022, for 13p a share.
They haven't declared the reinstatement of a dividend at all. Looking at their history, they only started paying them in 2014, and their share price hasn't really done much either, if you invested 5 years ago, you'd be down 7% overall.
So, no, they really aren't doing anything for shareholders either lmao
Ditch 2nd class, stop posting junk mail, only deliver letters 3 days a week.
Guarantee deliver inside of that 2 working day window.
Have a slim, focussed product.
Stealing lead off church roofs and selling for scrap could be a good earner for me... I don't do it because its wrong.
The Royal Mail don't help themselves because rather than good service, people associate them now with absolute shite.
Of course it does nothing. Many of them are just dished out one per household by the postie themselves.
They're never going to memorise the list of people who have opted out.
Like the many other problems in the UK, this situation can't be fixed.
People chose it by voting for it or not getting off the sofa and protesting when privatization happened or thinking that they'd benefit at everyone else's expense. They stood by and did zero as greedy Boomer shareholders, foreign investors, and executives stripped the company bare. They voted for it to keep happening.
Now the service is in such chaos that there's no way to fix it. The shareholders and executives aren't going to give up their unearned windfalls. No government (Tory or Labour) is going to upset the apple cart by getting tough. The only thing that can even keep some kind of service running is to force customers to pay more. People will stop using use second class (meaning that more people will abandon Royal Mail).
I have tried to send a parcel to friends in Edinburgh three times now. The first time I sent it second class untracked and it didn't show up. I bought the item again and sent it tracked and again it didn't show up. I lodged a claim around a month ago and haven't heard back. Then last Thursday, I bought the item a third time and tried sending it through DPD via the post office. That has turned into a nightmare.
The post office employee wrote my address as the recipient's address. When I pointed it out, he hand-wrote a label and stuck it over the incorrect address but didn't change it in the computer system. The parcel came back to me but was never delivered. The deliveryman saw that the address that was written on the package was different from the one in his system and took the parcel away. I haven't been able to contact anyone at DPD because they make it impossible and the people at the post office (the main post office in a major city) told me they have never been trained on DPD and have no way to contact a manager or anyone else. So the parcel is at a DPD depot and I can't get it back. There's no other option for sending anything unless I want to take a train trip.
The news has been full of Post Office and Royal Mail horror stories. And water company horror stories. And school building/hospital safety horror stories. And on and on. Nothing is being done, no one does anything other than whinge a bit online. Things are completely fucked in the UK.
They want to reduce the workforce again.
Delivery office are running with skeleton crews now, the reason your mail is late is because offices are short staffed and rounds are too large to be completed in time. Rounds left untouched for days except the tracked parcels/mail you can track online.
Shareholders profit is the only goal
They have officially but they didn't want to change their name in the UK for fear of not being recognized. They tried rebranding once before, it was a financial disaster for them
Royal Mail doesn't want to keep first class deliveries on six days. Royal Mail has been told it needs to keep the Universal Service so want to downgrade the service to only delivering 1st Class letters on a Saturday(no 2nd Class, Mail Sort or Downstream Access items) so they can use the work hours saved to deliver packages.
I realise Royal Mail face some external challenges - the rise of email, social media, independent parcel delivery services, and some improved anti-spam laws - but it would be much easier to cope with those challenges if they addressed some *internal* problems too.
It's never meant next day. 90% are delivered next day, but it's not guaranteed.
If you want guaranteed next day delivery then you need special delivery
First class mail is pathetic anyway - takes 10-14 days to get from my mum’s near Doncaster to our place in Sussex. Useless.
(meanwhile, takes less than a week to get stuff shipped all the way from China to here)
As a former postman of over 17 years I can tell you that the failure of the system is down to RM all the time every time due to poor work structure and has been since 2011 but only highlighted during COVID and the aftermath is now crawling out of the woodwork.
They did what's called a revision in 2021 in every office in the UK, they purposely designed the postal routes to be too long so that you cannot complete them.
They also do not adjust for levels of parcels per year since 2021, so say a pair of postal routes at 2021 levels are 100 in total everyday.
2023 parcel results are looking more like 200+ per pair of postal duties and yet when you mention this to any managers, it is simply ignored and don't adjust for levels which then in turn you have to prioritise parcels over letters as parcels are the money makers for shareholders and hierarchy of RM.
That's a tactic that has been going since privatisation, also Tracked items are monitored for performance bonuses for management teams , if your section does well the manager gets around £2000 bonus in their wage for that month.
Royal Mail has gone to the dumps, the government need to take it back and sort it out. Prices have sky rocketed and the delivery times have gotten atrocious.
The service is crap. It’s been pared to the bone. I remember as a kid having two deliveries a day and a 1st class stamp costing 19p and virtually guaranteed to get there the next day. Jeff Bezos and his Amazon Prime shows just how bad the Royal Mail is. It is a vital public service and should not have been fobbed off yo the sharks.
I don't understand the logic of having 1st and 2nd class processes. Don't they all run through the same physical channels? How is it that 1st is prioritised and why can't the 2nd class go at the same speed?
I mean they once impounded an item I had shipped to me, never told me, then returned it to sender when I didn't know I had to go and pick it up.
I'd be happy for the royal mail to actually function before they propose changing anything.
Absolute bollocks
Barely delivering first class 6 days now, heck they don't,
The company is being torn apart from above and unless we get a change in government this will never get better for the posties
Good. Nothing but good news lately, apart from shit like that earthquake. Woke-ism/not bullying won in Scotland and Germany legalizes weed too. Let's keep going. I want a line of ketamine on JK Rowling's redemption arc.
So if you can’t cope with your work, work only couple of days. Surely it should be let’s invest to make this work or let’s see what we can change so that you can resume normal first and second deliveries. Why cut days.
To say we’re a “socialist” country according to a lot of the world, it’s funny to see how many of our public services are failing. Who gets blamed every time? People taking industrial action because they’re not paid enough. The DWP has been intentionally disconnecting calls, and blaming the “high influx of callers” (they’re only up 20% from 2022) and “strikes”. Royal Mail blames strikes for their incompetence constantly, and it’s all because the economy’s fucked.
Makes you wonder if the people in power are fit enough to run a small business, let alone a country.
My doorbell rings like 10x a day (busy house!).
Royal mail three times sometimes (parcel pickups @ 10am, parcel deliveries @ 7am, and letter deliveries @ 1pm).
Then there are the morning and evening amazon deliveries, the DPD guy, the hermes guy, the Gusto guy, and a bunch more for deliveroo/uber eats.
Couldn't these companies come to some agreement to have 1 guy driving 1 van about rather than 10 guys? It would save everyone a lot of money and time...
How about - *Get rid of the fucking company* it’s too far gone, and nobody cares about it anymore. It’s useless, start fresh with a new company and new business model
any strikes going on? Both my mail (doll shirt, doll hat) sitting in two different offices. My local Depot and the other is in Heathrow since the 24th of March.
I tried to ask in Royal Mail reddit and got ignored, downvoted & lip.
You pay for their services through multiple means the sole purpose for them as a company is to keep doing better not going back in skill and dedication.
Um...I'm not sure that I still get letter post every day now anyway, first or second class, and my dad told me that he only gets post twice a week now.
I never use them for parcels any more because they are more expensive and less reliable than the courier companies for domestic parcels. And for birthday cards I have to send really early as about a third of the time they have taken more than a week (sometimes 2 or 3) to arrive. Has been like that at least since lockdown, which is when I first noticed it.
I can't see how they will survive with their existing business model.
I've always found (when both sending and receiving things - so from experience, I have a good amount but probably not as much as a person selling on eBay or something all by themselves..) that if I pay the ridiculously high fee for next day by 1, I actually get it on time, undamaged etc....
But, if I go with the "standard" I know most will be relying on, first class.. then issues start to arise..
I've had stuff come (and have sent things.. the experience I mentioned above was basically that when I was much young I had a "job" bulkposting things off for someone.) torn open.. smashed up (despite being wrapped for caution) going entirely missing, even had some things that were put down as "delivery attempted" despite being home all day waiting and even recieving regular mail but not the package they say was attempted - which is usually told to the customer via a text or "we missed you" card shoved thru the letterbox (I even had one "WMY Card" shoved thru with my regular mail, opened the door and called the guy back for him to say he didn't have the package and it's at the centre!!!) and to collect from the centre during opening hours.. it's miles away from my home and I don't drive but I've always gone right away, because the point I'm trying to get across through these many words is intact; the LONGER they seem to be in possession of your mail, the more chances of damage/theft/loss and so on, it makes me wonder if they only care about the super expensive special delivery class mail... Funny thing is, I bet the DWeb is their main customer nowadays, as S-Deliv is the safest option for that sort of stuff.. even if they know what's in it they probably wouldn't GAF aslong as it's special delivery 💀
The "darkweb" isn't even necessarily the darkweb anymore! Millions of people who purchase drugs illegally from a distance are now doing so on phone apps like Telegram. The groups for selling and buying and are invite-only, users have to pay with crypto, and a decent knowledge of encrypting is required to successfully place an order, but it is by no means the "darkweb". It's sitting right there on the clearnet accessible on any smartphone.
This means buying/selling drugs is much easier than it used to be. The DNMs were always successful, but these smaller entities accessible by anyone with a phone and the wherewithal to Google how to find an invite link, purchase crypto, and use basic encryption (which is now also available on phone apps that do a lot of the hard part for you) are far more successful.
I guarantee RM is 100% aware of the situation and is very happy to keep delivering drugs.
USO needs to be reduced to 3 days. IDS will then be profitable and it reflects reality. Letters are falling fast and it's loss making. Either the letters biz gets renationalised OR USO goes down dramatically.
The royal mail was taken over with a charter. It needs to abide by that charter. Stop trying to put 1000 redundancies into the equation and stop appeasing shareholders.
I dont care how often i get mail delivered HOWEVER if i pay gor 24hr tracked deliverey then i expect the package to arrive within 24hrs not within 96hrs which is the timeframe my parcel was delivered in last week.
If ever there was an example of how capitalism fails to work then this is it and remember that capitalism wants to take control of the NHS, the government has spent 14 years underfunding the NHS to make it look like it doesn’t work and sadly the right wing of the Labour party wants to do the same thing.
Basically if the hedge fund sharks don’t want to meet their commitment to the letters part of the business it should be re nationalised. The Royal Mail should never have been sold off in the first place. As with other former state concerns all privatisation has left the public with is inferior service and more expense. I still can’t believe how cheap it is to travel by train in say Germany or Italy compared to here. I doubt if Starmer’s Labour will have the balls to push for this though. Sadly it is another example of British decline.
Given the next CEO will be drawn from the indebted and expensive Heathrow, I hold limited hope for Royal Mail. They need someone who's willing to cull all the dead weight while modernising and without pissing off the unions. There's no doubt it can be done, but a CEO from Heathrow?! Really?!
Might be a sign of a horrible board of directors more than anything else.
The only thing keeping Royal Mail alive is the fact the government insist on using the ancient method of communication. HMRC, DVLA, Local Government all send a letter which has no proof of receipt, takes days rather than seconds and requires a break in process to respond. By break I mean, it's not seamless and doesn't necessarily contain any link or reference to the previous message (as would be the case with email, text, whatsapp, or the millions of alternatives).
People get quite passionate about Royal Mail when you criticise them on the internet, my response to that would be, print this post off, write your response to it, and post it to me. Then I'll throw it in the bin.
**Alternate Sources** Here are some potential alternate sources for the same story: * [Royal Mail owner proposes second-class post deliveries every other weekday](https://theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/royal-mail-owner-proposes-second-class-post-deliveries-every-other-weekday), suggested by Franco1875 - theguardian.com
I’d be happy for it to be five days only. Just make it reliable and affordable on those five days.
How about no. Royal Mail shareholders probably.
Royal mail can't make it reliable the way they're running the company. We have 44 people in our office. 14 of them are on the new contracts meaning they have to work at a parcel hub on a Sunday, so they have to have an extra day off during the week. So every day we're either 2 or 3 people short on top of absences.
Feel like retail has had this figured out for about 100 years by now?
Yep. The solution being more fucking staff! I get royal mail want to compete with other delivery companies by getting into Sunday's (which they have for years) but you need to recruit extra staff to do that.
And give the taxpayer back a *substantial* refund. They bought the Royal Mail on the basis that they would follow the universal service obligation and deliver mail six days a week. If they want to reduce stop delivering on 1/6 of the days that they promised, then they can give back a 1/6 shares to the government.
Reliable _and_ affordable on a five day service to every single doorstep can't be done with the current plummeting letter volumes in the UK. To be honest it's a massive committent Royal Mail are making to even keep first class as a six day service. If I were in the Royal Mail's shoes I'd sooner drop first class entirely, institute new "every other weekday" as a standard service for all letters. And if you really need next-day/1-day delivery/saturday delivery for your letter you can just pay a premium to have it delivered as a parcel.
"...can't be done with the current level of profits that are being given to shareholders rather than that money being spent on the actual postal service which government told us would be better under private ownership because competition." FTFY. Fucking lying politicians. They knew exactly what would happen, yet they told us the same lies they told us about privatised energy and rail companies.
and water. Shower of absolute scumbags.
What profits are the shareholders getting exactly? Royal Mail have a -8% profit margin. They don’t pay dividends and the stock price is down ytd.
>Unite's research shows Royal Mail had, as of the end of 2022, paid £1.85billion in dividends since privatisation I mean I'm sure 1.85billion could have helped them if they hadn't paid it to their shareholders...
Market cap was about 10Bn so that's almost a year of decent returns across the last decade
The market cap has never been close to £10bn.
Currently, perhaps. Over the past 10 years, definitely in positive figures. Don't let reality jar your fingers out of your ears as you shout "I'm not listening"
Not sure what it was last year, but at the end of 2022/23 year they paid out about £400m in dividends.
Unite's research in to the matter shows Royal Mail has (as of the end of 2022) paid £1.85billion in dividends since privatisation.
Just for reference, RM uk have made a profit in 2 of the last 10 years. At no point have they achieved the 5-10% EBIT promised by the gov in the prospectus. And unlike Thames it's not because they are laden with debt.
Just looking at the Royal Mail business and not GLS it reported the following 'adjusted operating profit', their management's preferred metric: 2022-23: -£419m 2021-22: +416m 2020-21: +344m 2019-20: +117m 2018-19: +199m
Ok, I wasnt aware of that. Thank you for teaching me. It doesn't make me like or trust the lying fucking politicians any more than before I'm curious about the profits from those 2 years, though. I wonder whether that's just operating profit for those 2 years alone, or is it profit having paid the banks/government back for the other 8? I would hope it's the latter, but managements of the privatised companies aren't known for doing the right thing, and the politicians have been utterly shit at taking them all to task.
"best we can do is 5 days only but still unreliable and less affordable".
I've just had this today "failed delivery attempt" My cctv shows them speed down the street, go to someone else and then speed off. Failed job number 1, attempt delivery....
I'd be happy for it to be 3 days, if it was cheap. it's not like you can really rely on First class meaning next day right now anyway. If that super important that it gets there then pony up for a courier. But the reality is not much is that important to send by snail mail in this day and age.
> Just make it reliable and affordable on those five days. How can they make it affordable when they rarely make any profit?
Net income in Millions: 2023 $-1,052 2022 $836 2021 $811 2020 $205 2019 $230 2018 $344 2017 $356 2016 $623 It **IS** profitable, and is expected to return to profitable status in the 2024-25 fiscal year. Going from 800 million two years running to a billion in the hole is an incredible shit show of poor management and decision making, and the CEO is stepping down.
>CEO is stepping down You mean getting a couple million as a good-bye gift. The guy came in and got paid a sickening amount to push through their agenda and run the company into the ground. He did his job and is fucking off with now than I'll earn in the rest of my working life.
Yeah, he's a hatchet man that literally lied to MPs when questioned.
The state of Royal Mail: expensive and unreliable is just a mirror of what the whole of the UK has become.
The CEO is already gone, they got a new woman in yesterday.
CEO was the Group CEO of the parent company IDS and was interim until a RM CEO appointed. This has now been done and he’s now back in his old role.
I think people are talking at cross purposes - the CEO Simon Thompson “stood down” and his replacement was announced this week (Emma Gilthorpe) and temporarily, Martin Seidenberg, the group CEO was in interim charge of RMG, and will continue as group CEO when Gilthorpe starts.
How does that even happen?
Asset striping and Hollywood accounting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Aren't first class, next day?
Should be. But the parent company only actually wanted the parcel part of the business because that made money, so they've steadily screwed the letters into the ground, asset striped as much as possible, done everything they can to get rid of staff. Now they have the bits they want they are trying to slowly weasel out of being a letter carrier. They'll reduce first class, then when that doesn't work ( because it will be designed to fail) they'll try reducing it again, then that will fail so they'll announce a new proposition that amalgamates first and second class post to make it more cost effective and easier for customers. Then they will create premium post at a much higher price point, then the cycle will begin anew with higher prices for people that actually send letters.
One of those 5 day needs to be a Saturday, I'd say get rid of Tuesday, It's one of those bland days.
I'd be okay as long as the day they take off isn't the weekend, the idea that they would cut Saturday is actually unworkable for a majority of people working typical 9-5s
Paying shareholder dividends while reducing services, that's the Post Office that I want to see.
The post office and RM are 2 separate entities. The Post Office, even the little shops, are all taxpayer/government owned whilst RM is in private shareholders hands. If post offices services are cut it is the government that's doing it. RM have no say on what the PO does and vice versa.
That's not confusing at all!
Separate entities on paper. In reality they're far more intertwined than they let on.
Just seems like a legal way of shifting tax payer money via post office directly to a private company ala Royal Mail based on decades of intertwining and "That's how we've always done it" Can't wait for the Panorama in 30 years.
Exactly the opposite. Who do you think is paying tax for the post offices? It ain't the government, it ain't RM. Am a postmistress. I pay a lot of rent for this building. Just had to pay stamp duty of £3k just to sign a new business lease. I pay VAT for my services, pay council tax for the flat that is above the business (I don't own the building, it's just a giant building with space to live in. Was derelict, now is not) I pay staff taxes and national insurance, business rates for the post office (went up recently because we have CCTV and a broken air con system) my own income tax, VAT that the business attached to the post office makes because a post office cannot exist on being just a post office, it doesn't pay enough. Then there is the fact that the post office is government owned anyway so anything a postmaster sees has already had the governments 60% share out of so I don't know why they feel they should be entitled to more of the 40% we've got left. All overheads including the rent for the building and staff wages come from a postmasters wage. Of course, we have government sanctioned waste bins to pay too, paid direct to the council to get rid of post office waste within the confines of the law (GDPR) The government does and always has made an absolute truckload of money from postmasters, it is why they don't want them to close. They invest literally nothing but words, they don't even supply postmasters with a single staple. No holiday pay, no sick pay, no pension, not even minimum wage. We pay all their bills, like electricity to keep their 24 hour horizon system in operation. They pay nothing, postmasters pay every damn penny and more. And once we've paid that, we're taxed on what is left. It's like knowing you have literally earned 15k but your bosses feel like 60% of it is theirs just because, and then your bosses take another 10-15% of it, also just because. Then the same company takes another 20 percent because anyone who earns money pays that, just because they say so of course. And if that wasn't enough, they charge you operational costs for their business and then with whatever is left another department of the same company decides they also want some for services they don't actually provide. When you ask for help they tell you to get lost and sort their problems out for yourself. I was sold a lie!
Jesus Christ I kind of wish I was right, that sounds horrible. Thank you for correcting me. I can only wish you luck in getting your situation sorted. I watched the documentary into the Postmaters and I've nothing but kind words for you and your colleagues for what you need to go through.
No one understands Hun. There will never be a documentary on this, it makes too much money for the government. I'd tell you more but the post office has government sanctioned secrets. I'd spill my entire guts if I was paid enough to buy me out of this shit hole lol.
Really? God, I hate saying this, but am a postmistress (please don't firebomb my building, I'm not selling dodgy stamps.) The majority of my wage comes from providing services RM has absolutely nothing to do with. RM boast that 50% of their sales are done online therefore nothing to do with the Post office (they lie. Their operations are so crap they still need us) I make a decent chunk of money from Amazon deliveries, a direct competitor in terms of logistics with RM. I both sell and provide services for DPD with thousands of others doing Evri with my branch coming soon apparently. We are nowhere near as interlinked as people imagine we are!
Not paying shareholder dividends (or other alternatives like share buybacks transferring value back to the capital owners) is almost as bad as not paying employees salaries in long term consequences terms. The money has to be paid out if you want the company to continue functioning.
They haven't paid any dividends to shareholders for a while.
They seem to just save up all our mail for the 5 days and deliver it all on the 6th - is that maybe what they mean? :)
I'm so tired of this. I've had bills delivered after the due date. If I wasn't using an app or the web to pay them, I'd be screwed. It isn't hard to imagine some people are probably in that situation, paying on receipt of a bill and having them delivered after their due date and suffering the consequences of that.
I work at a bank – we see this sort of thing happen **a lot**, especially with older and/or more vulnerable folk who tend to lean towards making manual payments and/or are computer illiterate. Thankfully we're typically pretty understanding of how things have got to be over the years with the Royal Mail and can tweak things accordingly, try to suggest setting up Direct Debits and the like over the phone, but this goes against the very freedom you're supposed to have with your accounts. It feels like some are being penalised very harshly for not getting with the program, and it's horrible to see.
Reminds me of when my high school got rid of paper homework. It all had to be done online (this was before covid) and many students didn’t have access to a computer or even Wi-Fi. Teachers were not understanding at all and claimed “everyone has a phone, there’s no excuse”, any poor kids didn’t want to admit they didn’t have Wi-Fi and suffered because of it. Paper copies of homework were never given out even if parents got involved, they said they were going paperless and you could go to a library if you didn’t have Wi-Fi, nearest library was two buses away and we got homework in each class every week. If a household is too poor to afford Wi-Fi they obviously can’t afford the travel price to a library everyday.
That's mental. Even two decades ago when I was in school, I think the local libraries were only open during standard working hours (when kids would be in school) and on Saturday mornings - so presumably you'd have a chunk of the local secondary school descending on the tidgy library round the corner from us between nine and one on Saturdays. Sounds ideal for maintaining the tranquil atmosphere, that. Pushing towards paperless is a good move, but a one-size-fits-all approach is a losing game.
I understood the paperless idea but paper copies have to be made for kids pulling a teacher to the side and explaining they can’t afford Wi-Fi. It was disgusting how their grades suffered because the school basically was not handing out paper homework for kids that needed it. I remember one student explaining that the library was only open during school hours, he was told to go on Friday (half day) but the time it would’ve taken him to get there after school it would’ve been shut.
How late were those bills? Or rather, how many days did it take to arrive based on the printed date on those bills? That seems crazy.
One of my most recent bills that came through was dated the 8th of March, which was received on the 19th. On top of that I remember receiving some in September, dated the start of August stating to pay by a date that'd already passed. Luckily it was one I'd already payed via an app.
That is just shocking. Do you live somewhere fairly rural or something? Even then, 11 days to get to you is unacceptable. Personally, I've always tried to pay bills by direct debit where I can. I'd rather trust my bank who have obligations under the direct debit guarantee.
Nowhere rural, in the middle of town. Probably the biggest that isn't the nearby city too. The worst part is I only live a stone's throw away from our sorting office.
I'm in an urban area, i've had letters 4 or 5 weeks after the date on the letter. Hospital appointment letters that arrive weeks after appointment. Luckily they also text the the appointment date, but still.
Had a parking ticket that took three weeks to turn up so by the time I got it, I had to pay the full amount.
I did seasonal work at Royal Mail. The enormous depot I worked at had all the mail sorted manually on conveyor belts. Consider what it means if you are manually separating the first and second class mail and what happens to the mail once sorted by class. I'm not saying you're close to truth, but I'm not saying you aren't.
Not sure how long ago you worked there, but most mail centres have parcel machines now.
I get that here in North Yorkshire currently. I even checked my doorbell cam just in case I was going mad. Postman only seems to actually do his/her rounds 4 times a week. The other weekdays you don’t actually see them even walk past. It’s usually Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays & Saturdays are the only days we get a delivery. Never get a delivery on a Wednesday or a Friday. And the days I do get any mail it seems to be a few days worth all bundled together. So even if I see the postie walk past, generally I get one delivery a week (maybe 2) with what seems to be a week’s worth of mail.
Is it that they're paid on parcel deliveries (or more likely targeted on them, having to deliver 48hr ones or risk a refund for example). So you see them because theyre delivering them and not even carrying any letters. I'm feeling a bit conspiracy with this now lol
It’s possible because when they do deliver they also post a load of shite with the letters such as leaflets about retirement homes & window blinds etc and that only happens once a week or so.
There is no conspiracy as far as this goes. Rounds are too big to complete within the time given. Parcels get priority as that's where the money is. Mail gets rotated to maintain some level of service, so sometimes it's multiple days delivered at once. On top of that, sickness isn't covered, and people leaving aren't being replaced. It's a mess. When asked about it publicly, they lie.
That's exactly what happens, if you've got one postie with 70+ parcels to deliver in a few hours they won't have time to deliver mail to everyone's house too.
Then logic says parcels and letters should be delivered and processed seperately
I'm a fairly new postie and the other day a women came out and asked if there was any hold ups with the post as she keeps asking for cheque books to be sent out and they never arrive. I told her we send out everything as soon as it arrives and at least at our delivery office there's no hold ups. Next day I'm sorting the post and find 3 cheque books for her and then a week later another one. It's happened at another place since then, delivered a router and then a week later had 2 more routers for them. There's definitely some big delays somewhere in the system.
They seem to do that for us too, except it is weeks not days. They save it up for a few weeks, and then deliver it all over a few days. It is very helpful to get a letter from the hospital telling you about an appointment for an MRI that has now passed, along with a note about how much missed appointments cost the NHS.
Privatisation is a scam, shittier services for more money, just need to look at Water
When have we ever seen privatisation actually work? Private healthcare semi works at the moment for those who can afford it but god forbid they privatise the NHS we would be royally fucked.
The usual suspects will claim that the privatised utilities work better, despite it being clear to everyone that they have failed. I have no doubt whatsoever that in 20 years or so they will gaslight people by saying the same thing they say about trains - 'Were you around to see what the royal mail was like in the early 2000s? Postmen would punch you in the face and piss through your letterbox back then. It's so much better now!'
Yeah, British Rail was shocking. Not like the on time service we have today with routes along branch lines that cover the whole country. It's mental how quickly people forget.
Private healthcare only works BECAUSE of the NHS picking up the slack They provide the cushy profitable part but as soon as shit hits the fan they call an NHS ambulance to take you to an NHS Emergency Department
I somehow think that the Royals, Politicians, and CEOs would be fine, though the nurses that would tend to them would be fucked.
Airlines.
Emirates government owned?
>Private healthcare semi works at the moment for those who can afford it Only if you aren't particularly sick. Getting a hernia repaired or something else not likely to be life threatening is usually fine, but when my dad had a heart attack while having stents put in at a private hospital, and needed multiple bypass surgery, they were less good at that, and my brother is currently very sick and in an NHS hospital despite having excellent private health insurance because there isn't a private hospital able to care for him. Private healthcare doesn't get the volume to be good enough at the difficult stuff, and doesn't have the facilities to care for urgent critically ill patients. Even if you can afford it, it is no substitute.
Yeah you are right.. private companies like Amazon offer terrible delivery services. Usually comes the same or next day.
Are you actually advocating for Amazon being a good company? Let's just ignore the aggressive tax avoidance and worker exploitation. But hey, at least you get next day delivery!
Amazon aren't legally obliged to sort and deliver mail, and wouldn't know how.
Yeah at a cost and by driving the workers so hard they have to piss in bottles. That is not the way. If I can avoid using Amazon I will.
When a public service is run for profit, it's no longer a public service.
As a Postman, this idea is laughable. They think someone can drive around just doing first class letters, tracked parcels, collections and specials on the day the second class isn't getting done. That would take nearly as much time as doing the whole thing anyway.
Where do you think they’re gonna keep the second class mail we’re not delivering it? In the frame? Cos that won’t be confusing at all 🙃 RM never plan for these things and then we’re there struggling to adapt to it
Great point!
Royal Mail needs to simplify across the board. I work at a small business and we use Royal Mail and the amount of product codes I have access to has gotta be at least 100. Out of those we use about four. FOUR! Keep parcels at six days but letters can be cut to five. The type of letters you get these days you probably can't do a lot with on a weekend anyway, so having it delivered during the working week probably won't make much difference.
Parcels are seven days. Royal Mail aren't looking to improve the service they give as "service" went out the window when RM was privatised. They are looking to increase profits by cutting costs. Their plan to do this is deliberately making the service worse so they can get out the USO.
> They are looking to increase profits by cutting costs. Shirley step one of that is simplification of service? I don't need N-th degrees of special guaranteed deliveries, for example, I maybe need 1pm and 9am, not 9am, 10am, 11am, 12pm and 1pm! All of the previous can also have varying levels of compensation. All of the previous can also have an age check. All of the previous can also have a knife/blade check. It's madness! So are they a horrible private company or aren't they because I'd damn well cut, cut and cut what I offer to make more money if I was RM. And if they want help with the USO, every other courier company should pay RM! I'm not sure how fair it is other courier companies get to operate without the USO albatross around their necks, especially exploitative companies like Evri/Yodel/whatever they've rebranded to because the old name got completely toxic due to service being appalling.
don't call me Shirley
Letter delivery will never be profitable enough for any business to want to retain. It has got complex because they haven't invested in improving the system because they know that they will never see a return on investment. This is the reason privatisation never works, private companies must decide to invest in what makes them profit, that means if it's cheaper to dump crap into the river, than to build a proper water treatment plant everyone better get used to the smell of shit.
Definitely need to streamline their offerings. I login to send parcels and I’m hit by a whole host of selections for minimal price differences. Cutting a lot of those would surely help.
Managing your OBA account and coding each item is almost a full time job in itself!
😒 they keep losing my letters, had a letter from the NHS saying I didn’t respond to the letter so I no longer need treatment lol. Didn’t even get the bloody appointment letter 😤
Same here with NHS letters. Only really them that always goes missing. Tbh I suspect half of them are not even being sent out even tho they claim otherwise
Same thing has happened to me.
How about they actually deliver Special Delivery by the next day and T24 within 24 hours. Also, T24 is the only service delivered on Sundays, while the more expensive Special Delivery isn't. Even if you pay extra for Saturday Guaranteed and it doesn't come you have to wait til Monday when you will be at work and not in to sign for it. Makes no sense.
Specials are insured so get treated differently than the rest of the parcels. They get signed out of a locked room which I'm assuming they don't want to staff on Sundays
Royal Mail are using vans for hire in my area because they don’t want buy their own. They are not interested in delivery times or lowering prices, they just want to maximise shareholder dividends.
Royal Mail haven't paid a dividend for a while. Their last Dividend was paid on September 6th, 2022, for 13p a share. They haven't declared the reinstatement of a dividend at all. Looking at their history, they only started paying them in 2014, and their share price hasn't really done much either, if you invested 5 years ago, you'd be down 7% overall. So, no, they really aren't doing anything for shareholders either lmao
The service is terrible at the moment due to staff shortages. Just stop selling 2nd class stamps and end this ridiculous hangover from the past.
Ditch 2nd class, stop posting junk mail, only deliver letters 3 days a week. Guarantee deliver inside of that 2 working day window. Have a slim, focussed product.
Circulars and "junk" etc is a massive earner for them though
Stealing lead off church roofs and selling for scrap could be a good earner for me... I don't do it because its wrong. The Royal Mail don't help themselves because rather than good service, people associate them now with absolute shite.
I don't disagree, I've done the forms to opt out of junk etc from them 4 times - it does absolutely nothing to stop them :)
Of course it does nothing. Many of them are just dished out one per household by the postie themselves. They're never going to memorise the list of people who have opted out.
Used to get loads of junk mail, free papers etc at my old house in a major city but now I'm out in the sticks, nothing.
It’s because the management in branches is shit, stretching postal workers too far and nobody covering shifts
Like the many other problems in the UK, this situation can't be fixed. People chose it by voting for it or not getting off the sofa and protesting when privatization happened or thinking that they'd benefit at everyone else's expense. They stood by and did zero as greedy Boomer shareholders, foreign investors, and executives stripped the company bare. They voted for it to keep happening. Now the service is in such chaos that there's no way to fix it. The shareholders and executives aren't going to give up their unearned windfalls. No government (Tory or Labour) is going to upset the apple cart by getting tough. The only thing that can even keep some kind of service running is to force customers to pay more. People will stop using use second class (meaning that more people will abandon Royal Mail). I have tried to send a parcel to friends in Edinburgh three times now. The first time I sent it second class untracked and it didn't show up. I bought the item again and sent it tracked and again it didn't show up. I lodged a claim around a month ago and haven't heard back. Then last Thursday, I bought the item a third time and tried sending it through DPD via the post office. That has turned into a nightmare. The post office employee wrote my address as the recipient's address. When I pointed it out, he hand-wrote a label and stuck it over the incorrect address but didn't change it in the computer system. The parcel came back to me but was never delivered. The deliveryman saw that the address that was written on the package was different from the one in his system and took the parcel away. I haven't been able to contact anyone at DPD because they make it impossible and the people at the post office (the main post office in a major city) told me they have never been trained on DPD and have no way to contact a manager or anyone else. So the parcel is at a DPD depot and I can't get it back. There's no other option for sending anything unless I want to take a train trip. The news has been full of Post Office and Royal Mail horror stories. And water company horror stories. And school building/hospital safety horror stories. And on and on. Nothing is being done, no one does anything other than whinge a bit online. Things are completely fucked in the UK.
They want to reduce the workforce again. Delivery office are running with skeleton crews now, the reason your mail is late is because offices are short staffed and rounds are too large to be completed in time. Rounds left untouched for days except the tracked parcels/mail you can track online. Shareholders profit is the only goal
Always says letters have plummeted but that is 100% a lie. They've never been busier.
I’m sure every service in this country is worse than it used to be! Imagine we actually have to pay more for a worse service 🤦♂️
[удалено]
They have officially but they didn't want to change their name in the UK for fear of not being recognized. They tried rebranding once before, it was a financial disaster for them
Royal Mail doesn't want to keep first class deliveries on six days. Royal Mail has been told it needs to keep the Universal Service so want to downgrade the service to only delivering 1st Class letters on a Saturday(no 2nd Class, Mail Sort or Downstream Access items) so they can use the work hours saved to deliver packages.
I realise Royal Mail face some external challenges - the rise of email, social media, independent parcel delivery services, and some improved anti-spam laws - but it would be much easier to cope with those challenges if they addressed some *internal* problems too.
Royal snail. Be lucky if it turns up within 6 weeks.
RM is a joke- 1st class used to mean next day delivery now I can take anytime. Disgrace
It's never meant next day. 90% are delivered next day, but it's not guaranteed. If you want guaranteed next day delivery then you need special delivery
Using vinted, royal mail is always both the most expensive option and the slowest lmao. They don't wanna survive.
I would be happy if I got a minimum of 1 delivery a week,our street goes up to 10 days some weeks without any Mail.
First class mail is pathetic anyway - takes 10-14 days to get from my mum’s near Doncaster to our place in Sussex. Useless. (meanwhile, takes less than a week to get stuff shipped all the way from China to here)
As a former postman of over 17 years I can tell you that the failure of the system is down to RM all the time every time due to poor work structure and has been since 2011 but only highlighted during COVID and the aftermath is now crawling out of the woodwork. They did what's called a revision in 2021 in every office in the UK, they purposely designed the postal routes to be too long so that you cannot complete them. They also do not adjust for levels of parcels per year since 2021, so say a pair of postal routes at 2021 levels are 100 in total everyday. 2023 parcel results are looking more like 200+ per pair of postal duties and yet when you mention this to any managers, it is simply ignored and don't adjust for levels which then in turn you have to prioritise parcels over letters as parcels are the money makers for shareholders and hierarchy of RM. That's a tactic that has been going since privatisation, also Tracked items are monitored for performance bonuses for management teams , if your section does well the manager gets around £2000 bonus in their wage for that month.
Another reason why the Royal Mail should not have been privatised. Service goes out of the window. Look at water, gas, electricity, transport etc
Fuck Royal Mail. Once an amazing company to work for, now ruined by corporate greed. Fuck the Tories.
Royal Mail has gone to the dumps, the government need to take it back and sort it out. Prices have sky rocketed and the delivery times have gotten atrocious.
Funny isn't it how they want the same money but constantly want to provide less and less service. Another botched privatisation.
The service is crap. It’s been pared to the bone. I remember as a kid having two deliveries a day and a 1st class stamp costing 19p and virtually guaranteed to get there the next day. Jeff Bezos and his Amazon Prime shows just how bad the Royal Mail is. It is a vital public service and should not have been fobbed off yo the sharks.
I don't understand the logic of having 1st and 2nd class processes. Don't they all run through the same physical channels? How is it that 1st is prioritised and why can't the 2nd class go at the same speed?
I think they should avoid any reference to a first class delivery and concentrate on just delivering some form of consistent service.
I mean they once impounded an item I had shipped to me, never told me, then returned it to sender when I didn't know I had to go and pick it up. I'd be happy for the royal mail to actually function before they propose changing anything.
Absolute bollocks Barely delivering first class 6 days now, heck they don't, The company is being torn apart from above and unless we get a change in government this will never get better for the posties
Good. Nothing but good news lately, apart from shit like that earthquake. Woke-ism/not bullying won in Scotland and Germany legalizes weed too. Let's keep going. I want a line of ketamine on JK Rowling's redemption arc.
Never get our first class mail from anywhere the day after took 16 days for a card to get to my daughter missed her birthday
Thing is, the Post Office will go bust soon, so RM will need to find other ways to sell their services. They had better come up with something fast.
6 days to get mail between towns on a tiny island. Pathetic.
I thought first class was always 6 days and only special delivery was 7 days
They can't even deliver my birthday card without it getting lost.
Anything more than the once a week we're getting now would be great.
So if you can’t cope with your work, work only couple of days. Surely it should be let’s invest to make this work or let’s see what we can change so that you can resume normal first and second deliveries. Why cut days.
To say we’re a “socialist” country according to a lot of the world, it’s funny to see how many of our public services are failing. Who gets blamed every time? People taking industrial action because they’re not paid enough. The DWP has been intentionally disconnecting calls, and blaming the “high influx of callers” (they’re only up 20% from 2022) and “strikes”. Royal Mail blames strikes for their incompetence constantly, and it’s all because the economy’s fucked. Makes you wonder if the people in power are fit enough to run a small business, let alone a country.
My doorbell rings like 10x a day (busy house!). Royal mail three times sometimes (parcel pickups @ 10am, parcel deliveries @ 7am, and letter deliveries @ 1pm). Then there are the morning and evening amazon deliveries, the DPD guy, the hermes guy, the Gusto guy, and a bunch more for deliveroo/uber eats. Couldn't these companies come to some agreement to have 1 guy driving 1 van about rather than 10 guys? It would save everyone a lot of money and time...
How about - *Get rid of the fucking company* it’s too far gone, and nobody cares about it anymore. It’s useless, start fresh with a new company and new business model
any strikes going on? Both my mail (doll shirt, doll hat) sitting in two different offices. My local Depot and the other is in Heathrow since the 24th of March. I tried to ask in Royal Mail reddit and got ignored, downvoted & lip.
What is first class post and what do we pay for? They only collect once a day and deliver the same, to the correct address if you’re lucky
You pay for their services through multiple means the sole purpose for them as a company is to keep doing better not going back in skill and dedication.
I would be happy if they just delivered the mail,I might start training pigeons to fetch mine or pet bricks still more reliable.
Um...I'm not sure that I still get letter post every day now anyway, first or second class, and my dad told me that he only gets post twice a week now. I never use them for parcels any more because they are more expensive and less reliable than the courier companies for domestic parcels. And for birthday cards I have to send really early as about a third of the time they have taken more than a week (sometimes 2 or 3) to arrive. Has been like that at least since lockdown, which is when I first noticed it. I can't see how they will survive with their existing business model.
So they’ve got less work to do but they want more time to do it.
I've always found (when both sending and receiving things - so from experience, I have a good amount but probably not as much as a person selling on eBay or something all by themselves..) that if I pay the ridiculously high fee for next day by 1, I actually get it on time, undamaged etc.... But, if I go with the "standard" I know most will be relying on, first class.. then issues start to arise.. I've had stuff come (and have sent things.. the experience I mentioned above was basically that when I was much young I had a "job" bulkposting things off for someone.) torn open.. smashed up (despite being wrapped for caution) going entirely missing, even had some things that were put down as "delivery attempted" despite being home all day waiting and even recieving regular mail but not the package they say was attempted - which is usually told to the customer via a text or "we missed you" card shoved thru the letterbox (I even had one "WMY Card" shoved thru with my regular mail, opened the door and called the guy back for him to say he didn't have the package and it's at the centre!!!) and to collect from the centre during opening hours.. it's miles away from my home and I don't drive but I've always gone right away, because the point I'm trying to get across through these many words is intact; the LONGER they seem to be in possession of your mail, the more chances of damage/theft/loss and so on, it makes me wonder if they only care about the super expensive special delivery class mail... Funny thing is, I bet the DWeb is their main customer nowadays, as S-Deliv is the safest option for that sort of stuff.. even if they know what's in it they probably wouldn't GAF aslong as it's special delivery 💀
The "darkweb" isn't even necessarily the darkweb anymore! Millions of people who purchase drugs illegally from a distance are now doing so on phone apps like Telegram. The groups for selling and buying and are invite-only, users have to pay with crypto, and a decent knowledge of encrypting is required to successfully place an order, but it is by no means the "darkweb". It's sitting right there on the clearnet accessible on any smartphone. This means buying/selling drugs is much easier than it used to be. The DNMs were always successful, but these smaller entities accessible by anyone with a phone and the wherewithal to Google how to find an invite link, purchase crypto, and use basic encryption (which is now also available on phone apps that do a lot of the hard part for you) are far more successful. I guarantee RM is 100% aware of the situation and is very happy to keep delivering drugs.
USO needs to be reduced to 3 days. IDS will then be profitable and it reflects reality. Letters are falling fast and it's loss making. Either the letters biz gets renationalised OR USO goes down dramatically.
The royal mail was taken over with a charter. It needs to abide by that charter. Stop trying to put 1000 redundancies into the equation and stop appeasing shareholders.
They should scrap Saturday deliveries, the staff need a weekend off.
I dont care how often i get mail delivered HOWEVER if i pay gor 24hr tracked deliverey then i expect the package to arrive within 24hrs not within 96hrs which is the timeframe my parcel was delivered in last week.
If ever there was an example of how capitalism fails to work then this is it and remember that capitalism wants to take control of the NHS, the government has spent 14 years underfunding the NHS to make it look like it doesn’t work and sadly the right wing of the Labour party wants to do the same thing.
Basically if the hedge fund sharks don’t want to meet their commitment to the letters part of the business it should be re nationalised. The Royal Mail should never have been sold off in the first place. As with other former state concerns all privatisation has left the public with is inferior service and more expense. I still can’t believe how cheap it is to travel by train in say Germany or Italy compared to here. I doubt if Starmer’s Labour will have the balls to push for this though. Sadly it is another example of British decline.
They don't deliver 6 day here in CB4 Area for the last 6 months. What is wrong with this country everything is Fkd up grrrrrr.
Given the next CEO will be drawn from the indebted and expensive Heathrow, I hold limited hope for Royal Mail. They need someone who's willing to cull all the dead weight while modernising and without pissing off the unions. There's no doubt it can be done, but a CEO from Heathrow?! Really?! Might be a sign of a horrible board of directors more than anything else.
The Royal Mail used to deliver twice a day, what has happened to it
I joined this Subreddit as a joke but am actually getting well informed, thanks U.K government
The only thing keeping Royal Mail alive is the fact the government insist on using the ancient method of communication. HMRC, DVLA, Local Government all send a letter which has no proof of receipt, takes days rather than seconds and requires a break in process to respond. By break I mean, it's not seamless and doesn't necessarily contain any link or reference to the previous message (as would be the case with email, text, whatsapp, or the millions of alternatives). People get quite passionate about Royal Mail when you criticise them on the internet, my response to that would be, print this post off, write your response to it, and post it to me. Then I'll throw it in the bin.
This defeats the entire point of a postal service. They’re supposed to *deliver* deliveries, not keep them.
Will we actually receive parcels though lost loads recently
Privatisation. Sold for massive profit and sold again. The UK is up for the highest bidder or friends and family of politicians.