The Royal Mail is dying on its arse

[KIlliePieMyOhMy]

Have friends that work for Royal Mail.
They tell me tracked parcels are the only thing that are prioritised.
Many posties bring letters back as they simply do not have time to complete a round.
If Royal Mail go to second class post not being daily they fear posties being made redundant.
Where did it all go wrong for this great national service,

I wouldn’t know - I haven’t bought a stamp in years. Every time RM screw up tracked mail, I complain and they send me another book of stamps as compensation.

Not exactly a good funding model (paying me to use their services rather than vice versa) but oh, well.

Stamps really are a lot of money. I think they are trying to stop people sending letters or any kind of cards. I do feel it’s a conspiracy of some kind , although our local card shops are always rammed , so it’s not working completely! ( people giving them out by hand ?)

It's fine up our road, all my post arrives on time and the postman comes at the same time every day

We don’t use it because it doesn’t work not because we don’t want to.
Amazon can get you stuff delivered the next day for a one time fee that also includes telly.
Royal Mail had an excellent start and they’ve failed to keep up. People would send more things including letters if it were cheap and reliable. Wasted opportunity.

“They tell me tracked parcels are the only thing that are prioritised.”

Well they’re not that prioritised - I posted a 24 hour tracked package on Tuesday: was told it would be delivered Thursday; it finally arrived on Saturday. I live an hour out of London: it was going to the big smoke, so hardly some rural service where you might expect it to take longer. And it’s not exactly cheap, either!!

Quite often we get a message saying we will attempt to deliver your parcel again on ‘so & so ‘ when they didn’t even attempt to deliver it in the first place, so basically what they’ve done is marked they tried to deliver it and no one was home when I know for a fact they haven’t as we have a ring doorbell… I was due a delivery on Saturday, checked on Sunday, still 500 miles away in some other sorting office. Several family members used to work for them years ago and it was okay the service back then. Nothing against my local posties they lost thier sorting office to asbestos before Christmas, they are good as gold, we have randomers delivering parcels now.

Would you think that delivery to what could be the other end of the country for under £2 was a lot of money if it hadn’t been cheaper in years gone by? Couldn’t buy a coffee or loaf of bread for that these days let alone the petrol to deliver it yourself?

i think Royal Mail have a difficult time as us that would remember buying a stamp remember it being in the 20p’s

TBH, I’d rather have them than Evrie or dpd, both of whom are beyond absolute crap. And have zero customer service. The only company who seem to deliver, and deliver on time, are Amazon.

My postie told me the same thing.
I think this is why govt are suggesting NHS letters have their own “ class” stamp!

Im in Northern Ireland so it's MyCare app. It's relatively new.

Our post has never recovered from covid. More than once my post has been delivered to a different village with a similar address despite having the correct postcode. In fact I received her credit card.

In my case I'd have three accounts to keep in check. Mine, mum with Alzheimers and Cancer and my 18 year old with complex learning difficulties. I'm too tired for nonsense.

Yes I agree just far too expensive for the service they offer. I send parcels a few times a year, always took them to the local post office, the price of sending them was ridiculous, so I now send them by Evri much cheaper. And I agree most people I know have cut down on sending cards generally and especially Xmas cards.

I send some work mail to about 40 people around UK. Same day. Same post box. Same 1st class postage.

About a third arrive next day. Another third take a few days. The rest, bar one or two, arrive a week after.

I always get one or two (not the same people each time) that don't arrive so I send again, and sometimes a third time. They almost always all turn up.....eventually.

I think last time they were £3.50 large letters. I'd imagine a courier might be close to working out cheaper and more reliable?

I got notified at least 5 times by text and email by my new ortho for my appointment - which I think is a bit of overkill.
I got one notice in the mail a week ago and then started getting bombarded by all these unnecessary repeated same reminders.
Once or twice is plenty.

I sent a parcel back free to Amazon with RM. This option to use this was carefully hidden away online , they mostly want people using the drop boxes in supermarkets and petrol stations. (One I haven’t tried yet myself, but it’s not meant to be that user friendly apparently! )
It’s a good service for the RM to pick up the parcels , but one that’ll probably end up costing or be fazed out eventually as they realize it’s not paying its way or just too much extra work.

Many NHS trusts, and some councils now, are sending some letters via "economy class" (which is basically a 3rd class). When the letters are sent over to the printers for printing and sorting each letter has a code that indicates which "class" to use. Eco class is always the last to be printed and sorted which often means that it is collected by either RM or Whistl up to 2 days later. It can often take 3-4 days from printing to arriving at the local sorting office ready for delivery, longer if the postcode is not printed or missing. I'm not saying that this is the sole reason why NHS letters arrive late, but it certainly doesn't help.

I live rurally and our lovely postie is part of the community and very much appreciated, but if it weren’t for him I’d avoid RM completely. Ditto our local sub post offices, which I try to support. But the main stuff they deal with for us is Amazon parcels and unwanted junk mail.

The expense of sending anything is astronomical vs other carriers, and often for a slower and less reliable service. Plus they’re the one and only delivery service I’ve ever had a real problem with.

They’re one of the only carriers in the UK licensed to handle wine and spirits, so I was forced to use them last Christmas, unfortunately. The package was not only 4 days late (despite paying for express delivery), we discovered that whilst being held at their London transit hub, it had been opened and the expensive gift we sent had been replaced with something worth a quarter of the price, then resealed with packing tape. We only knew it had happened at all because the recipient had sent a pic to thank us.

Despite logging a complaint and providing receipts and photographic evidence of the theft, it took 3 months to resolve and they tried very hard to push back and deny responsibility. In the end they were forced to acknowledge it and refund the full cost.

I don’t believe it was a one-off, either. It was a relatively sophisticated scam, which would likely have been quite lucrative if being done at scale. At that time of year they’d have been dealing with a lot of booze coming through the London sorting office, as people have no option other than to use RM.

Fucking shambolic and I’d never trust them with anything like that again.

You can get parcels delivered for less than three quid by most couriers, and usually with a 2 day turnaround, so yes, you’d be better off shopping around quite honestly.

Only 112 Hospital Trusts out of 215 currently use the NHS App so like Royal Mail a bit lot luck.

It will be interesting to see if / to what extent the dysfunctional service affects postal voting at the upcoming elections. The window for receiving the papers and then sending them back seems pretty tight. They’re being sent out “from” the 22nd. We’ve requested a postal ballot as we’re away from the 26th. I’m not optimistic that they’ll arrive before then. we often have no deliveries for days on end.

I think you are me! This is exactly my experience too!

It's all very sad and the postal service is due to be reduced even further.
I'm told that currently 4 duties are cover by 4 posties, but this is due to be reduced to 4 duties covered by 3 posties, so the service is going to get worse.

Me too. The elderly lady in front of me in the post office was sending a letter to Australia and that cost her £3.20 and she was saying how dear that was. To post to bleeding Gillingham cost me over half that (!!) so I told her I thought she was getting quite a good deal 🤣

Part of the problem is people thinking a couple of quid is a high price to pay for mail to be delivered from one end of the country to the other in a day

Well, people think that because it is 🤷🏻‍♀️

Indeed. For a bloody letter.