To feel sad that the 'corner shop' is now the 'parcel shop'?

Point blank refuse to get anything delivered to ours. I’ve done it by accident before and oh my god, it took them about fifteen minutes of faffing through piles and piles of parcels to find it. Absolutely useless. They don’t have any sort of system to organise them, there’s just huge piles of them all over.

I love it. So much more convenient than queuing at the post office (which aside from a couple of hours on Saturday morning, is very inconveniently closed at times when most people are not at work!).

As others have mentioned, the additional income will be helping keep these shops open.

I always buy stuff when I’m collecting or sending a parcel.

They clearly don’t have the room. Mine has a back room for all the parcels and appears as it’s normal corner shop self at the front

My understanding is that they get a very small fee for doing the parcels, but the main reason for doing it is increased footfall and the hope that it will lead to increased sales.

I'm not even the OP but this is an unnecessarily aggressive line of questioning for an innocuous remark, particularly given the poster you were replying to wasn't even contradicting you - they said themselves they assumed shops would charge a fee!

Even if they weren't sure because, for example, they thought that some shops might use the parcel collecting in the way they do loss leader pricing - thinking that if someone pops in to collect their parcel they might also get some milk while they are there, it's hardly a ridiculous comment, definitely no need for the snarky response.

Yes this.

Our local post office used to be lovely, it was in the butchers which is incredibly random but it was nice and good service. The butcher sold up last year and it’s now a corner shop and post office and a complete shithole. Parcels everywhere, having to stand in a queue for ages due to all the dithering of people dropping off a million parcels, I’m sure the handwritten lists of peoples names on all the piles of parcels are some sort of data breach as well

I agree. Better still having a shop, even if it is mostly parcels, than no shop at all. Hundreds of thousands of small "corner" shops have closed down over the last few decades as people turned away from them to shop at supermarkets instead. The ones remaining have to do whatever they have to do to stay viable.

Our family had a traditional newsagents in the 70s and 80s. Always busy, we sold everything from Easter Eggs to fireworks, to cigarettes, greetings cards, toys & games, etc as well as newspapers and magazines (plus deliveries). A huge Asda opened up a mile away, and our turnover plummetted overnight by around 75%. Even news delivery customers stopped their orders as they just walked to Asda each morning instead as it was closer. Obviously, we couldn't survive such a drop in turnover, and had to close the following year. Now it's yet another semi-derelict shop and has been in that state for 30 years! We were on a parade of around a dozen shops including butcher, greengrocer, bakers, etc - all shut because of that Asda, and now all there is on that parade is a money laundering Turkish barbers and a dodgy kebab shop.

Goodness, I'm not sure it was "aggressive" enough to resurrect a three-month old thread about.

Is this your first time online?

Yup, nail on the head. They need to do anything they can to increase footfall. Lots of people will go to a parcels shop instead of another nearby convenience store to buy a loaf of bread or pint of milk etc if they can drop off the parcel at the same time.