Things getting lost in Royal Mail!

[HaveringWavering]

I’ve ordered two things online in the last few weeks, one Etsy and one an Amazon Marketplace seller. Both dispatched by Royal Mail first class, neither has turned up after a fortnight. Earlier in the year another parcel disappeared never to be found, despite the sender paying for tracking.

Everything else I order via Amazon Prime, DPD, Hermes etc arrives no problem at all. What is wrong with Royal Mail, why are they so useless? Anyone else having similar issues? I’m 100% sure that the address is correct.

At work we used to send all our post by first class, then we used Recorded as so many first class items weren't delivered for around 10 days. Now even Recorded Delivery (signed for first class) takes days to get there so we have to use Special Delivery which at least guarantees delivery next day. It's probably companies like us having to do this that means standard post is being held up/lost.

There are big backlogs at the moment and also big staffing issues in some areas. I know Chelmsford is one area affected if that helps anyone

DH is a postie. Many of the local depots have been ravaged by covid so loads of people are off at short notice, plus the sheer volume of parcels over the past year is unprecedented. Some days they can’t even close the van doors because of how many parcels they have.

Royal Mail has given each office carte blanche to ‘fail’ duties, which means they don’t have to meet their usual targets so they are prioritising parcels over mail. Also, the 24 and 48 labels refers to how long the item is allowed to be left in the office once it arrives in your postcode, not how long it should take door to door.

Basically they are already swamped from everyone WFH and ordering online, plus Black Friday and now Christmas on top of that. Royal Mail are trying to make staff deliver 7 days a week and they have made their business case for delivery timings using data from a random Tuesday in 2019, which in no way reflects the state of their numbers today.

I hope this goes some way to explaining why it’s such a mess at the moment.

Royal Mail is excellent where I am, never had a parcel go missing. Hermes on the other hand, completely useless.

Parcelforce are the ones I hate. DS in Finland never got hos Christmas present last year after they tried to deliver it in Milton Keynes and kept emailing me telling me the address was incorrect. Then they lost it entirely once I managed to convince them the address was correct but they were looking in the wrong country.