What’s happening with the postal service? No mail

[ArseInTheCoOpWindow]

We get one big bundle of mail about once a fortnight ( big city, populated area) and nothing in between. I’m missing hospital appointments and other important stuff.

DH paid 7 quid for next day delivery for something 8 days ago. It’s still stuck in the postal system somewhere. Does anyone know what’s going on? We used to have first and second class mail. Now we have whenever mail. I’m so confused.

We get the post every day as normal, so definitely nothing going on here. And we live in the middle of nowhere down a long bumpy track.

We're in the centre of a small south-eastern city, and the mail deliveries are random. It's not usually quite as long as a fortnight, but days go by with nothing, then we get a whole bundle of stuff in a rubber band.

Ours is similar to yours we get mail every 4-5 days and nothing at all in between even if something has been ordered with next day delivery.

Ours has been like this since covid. Small village, we get post usually on a Thursday, and very occasionally on a Tuesday. Never any other days.

SW London and it's chronic, though has improved recently (perhaps after coordinating a complaint campaign). We used to get one delivery every other week or so, now we get a delivery every few days. I as still getting Christmas cards well in to February last year.

I thought it was just me.

Nothing for several days - a week, and then I randomly get a bundle of post on the same day. The most random part about this is I see the postie walk past the house every day, so it's not like they're missing our street. I wonder if they're just limiting the amount of post per street, so only delivering to certain numbers each day?

We are the same so asked the postie and he said it’s a real issue. He had about 50 properties taken off his round - but another 700 added.

They are useless. Utterly useless.

I paid for a rush order from my silver supplier as I have a deadline to meet. 24 hour tracked delivery. RM emailed me with time slot around yesterday lunchtime. Did it arrive? Of course not.

I’ve had to borrow some from a fellow silversmith.

I’ve just had an identical email saying it will be lunchtime today. We’ll see.

Ours is like this too. OH gets a weekly magazine which always used to arrive on a Thursday. The publication day hasn't changed, but it can be days later when it gets here - no mail for days then a pile all at once.

I've sent parcels and cards to the UK which have taken ages to reach the recipient. With the parcels I can track them as far as the UK, which doesn't take long, and then they can take up to a month to actually be delivered, so something strange is going on.

So why are we paying for things like first and second class post? Or next day delivery?

Instead we just get a bundle every 10 days or so

Same here, big bundle of mail once a fortnight and parcels AWOL for weeks on end. I used to dread something being sent via Evri but now I dread it being sent by Royal Mail, what’s happened?

I've given up paying extra as it's pointless. If I ever send a letter to stick a second class stamp on it. Unfortunately no amount of telling my FIL we only get post once a week changes his mindset that the Royal mail is the pinnacle of all delivery services I genuinely think he believes they still make deliveries twice a day.

Pinnacle of delivery service!😂😂😂

This is something we are experiencing.
Its interesting to see others are experiencing the same, I was starting to think someone was intercepting our post because we very rarely receive letters.

Amazon and Evri are miles better.

I noticed this a couple of months ago - we're getting hardly any post at all; I do see the postman visit but it seems to be just flyers that they're being paid to distribute?

Honestly he won't be told and he's totally living in the past. He paid almost £8 to send us a parcel at Easter and it arrived 11 days after he posted it!

I despair but he thinks Evri is shit and so sticks to RM even though our Evri delivery bloke is quite possibly the best in the world. Never had a missing parcel and he's even come back at times later in the day to deliver stuff if he's not been able to safely leave it.

Our service is amazing! Must depend where you are.

Yes, my post at home is like this. We get a bundle of mail about once every 2 weeks.

We’ve also missed hospital appointments as letters have not arrived in time. Our local hospital know there’s an issue so it’s annoying they’re continuing to send out short notice appointment letters through the post.

My DD has been on a waiting list for an assessment for about 2 years. She’s about to turn 18 so if she isn’t seen before her birthday the end of this month, she gets kicked off the list and has to start again with adult services. I specifically asked them, numerous times, not to send out the appointment time by post as we were having so many issues. They assured me they’d email me and contact me by phone. Did they? No. I get 2 letters on the same day - 1 with an appointment time (that we’d now missed) and a second telling us she’d been removed from the list as we didn’t attend the appointment so would need to be re-referred.

I phoned and begged and luckily they could see from her notes that I’d asked them to email and took pity on us and rescheduled her appointment, but it could have caused major issues for DD

Ours isn't as bad as yours OP but there's no doubt they save up the post and deliver 2-3 days a week.

It has also been like this since covid. I don't see how their staff can still all be off sick with covid. I think they want to do away with the universal obligation so are doing it by stealth.

Parcels arrive when they are meant to - at worst a day later than expected - no problems there. It's letters that are the issue - it's actually quite good that they have to deliver the pointless flyers because it means they have to come round at least once a week!

It really is time that hospitals sent out appointments by email where they can.

The postman on our round was taken off the round earlier this year and now we get mail when they can find someone else who has time to do it so about 4x a week on average , we definitely get days missed and also have no idea when it will be coming .

Where do you live out of curiosity? Your area appears to definitely be in the minority having experienced no change to the service.