to feel a natural hostility to post office workers

[onebigchocolatemess]

Whenever I go to a post office the staff seem to make it their sole ambition to take as long as possible to serve people, will often go off on a break when the queue is 10 people long and enjoy having a chat with each other instead of serving you!

My last two visits to different post offices involved the staff ridiculing the customers they were serving - the first being elderly and hard of hearing, and the second being at a woman who complained because the post office worker was serving someone who did not have enough money so ran back to her car and the worker refused to serve anyone else until this customer returned because she 'was in the middle of serving' despite the queue being out the door!

Some - not all obviously - but some Post Office workers treat customers like they are doing US a favour! I am all for keeping this British institution but they seriously need to address their attitude! I am in two minds to make a formal complaint about it tbh

AIBU to think that is not acceptable?

What you have described isn't acceptable.

Thankfully my local post office is the opposite and the staff will go out of there way to help.

YANBU to dislike poor service, wherever you find it. And the ridiculing of a customer is never OK.

YABU to generalise though!

YANBU to feel pissed off with bad service.

The staff in the PO I use are very good though. They're friendly but don't bugger around chatting when there's a queue. I like our postman too.

Hmmm. Having worked in a post office during my late teens I can safely say it was the shittiest job I ever had. Not a day went by when each member of staff wouldn't incur the wrath of disgruntled customers who seemed to have the most precious of time not to be wasted queuing up. Believe me there is nothing worse than looking up from your counter at a mile long queue of sour faced members of the public staring intently at you and mentally daring you to apologise for keeping them waiting. I'm made of stern stuff but there were times when I'd contemplate shoving the latest set of commemorative stamps (large) up the the nostrils of surly office workers who were actually outraged that the time they chose to do their pressing business (usually scratchcard redemptions and emergency passport applications) at the busiest post office in Manchester at lunchtime. The old dears paying bags of 5 pence pieces into their accounts were a joy and would always cheer me up. We had many complaints made about our thoughtlessness but none ever came to anything. :o

JKPP I finished my working life in the PO and agree with you. I would make it my "life's work" to make all the miserable/bad tempered ones smile or at least say "Thankyou". Have to admit I do miss the majority of regulars who, nice or nasty, at least made life interesting.

I have never ever met anyone working in a UK post office who wasn't absolutely lovely. (and I've been in the city centre Nottingham one, where the dregs of the underclass hold their daily chinwag....)

Come to my post office in the south of Italy where all the desk operator's mates jump the queue,they take personal phne calls while serving you and will frequently just get up and walk out without explaining why.

The staff in our local PO are lovely and v helpful. There is sometimes a queue but you can't really moan about that if they have all the counters open.

People are always moaning about customer service but it's a two way street and I see lots of miserable and rude people when shopping or in the PO.

People who work in retail are usually treated v badly, people assume they must be thick.

JKK - was that the post office just off Market Street. It was always heaving in there whenever I had to go in. I don't think I was ever rude to anyone.

I now use our small local post office and the husband and wife who run it are lovely.

As an ex post office worker I am going to have to say that, in the main, YABVU.
The only point I think is valid is that it's obviously not on for staff to be ridiculing the customers - but I'm sure that there are also nasty people who work in places other than Post Offices.
As for your other points - I'm sure that the people working there aren't going slow on purpose - what would they have to gain? Maybe they are newly trained and even if not it is in no-ones interest to rush transactions and make mistakes. Training encourages you to count cash/travellers cheques/foreign currency 3 times for example. Post office workers deal with vast amounts of money so they have to be careful with every transaction.
As for taking a break when there's a queue. At the PO I worked in often if you didn't take a break when there was a queue you wouldn't eat that day. Most Post Offices are very busy now as the less busy ones are being closed and that has a knock-on effect for the branches nearby. I used to find it particularly annoying when I pulled my blind down to eat my lunch (there was nowhere else) and people would be peering underneath and banging on the glass as if I was a lazy cow for having some lunch even though there were other people serving.
You also mention that a worker would not continue serving the rest of the queue while a woman went to the car to get her money. Depending on what transactions had been put through the system that was, quite possibly the quickest thing to do. There is no option to serve 2 people at the same time on the system that the PO uses so if the customer had posted a number of parcels the cashier would then have had to go into the admin part of the system and type a ridiculously long code for each individual parcel to avoid the next person being charged for them.
I reserve my hostility for the majority of Post Office customers who are invariably in a rush and rude and think that the world revolves around what they want to do. Never mind the fact that they have left it til the morning of their holiday to get an obscure foreign currency that has to be ordered in or that THEY have missed the last post. And Tbh OP - you sound like one of these customers.

Why do so many old people still go to the post office to get their pension when they could have it paid into the bank?

howdoyoueatyours I know exactly what you mean, I work in a bank and we get comments from people all the time like "why do you have to go to lunch when it is a busy time" and people moaning at cashiers changing over as it takes a couple of minutes to sign off/on a till. I understand that it's frustrating for customers to wait in a long queue, especially if it is your own lunch break you are using, but workers have to have time to eat especially if they are pregnant which myself and two of my colleagues have been in recent months, we are not doing it to spite people it is actually illegal to work a certain amount of hours without a break. Sometimes people are there to do transactions which take a few minutes, such as foreign money transfers, it's not the cashiers fault that the queue is then slow moving and it doesn't do anyone any good to kick up a fuss about it. The only point I agree with is making fun of customers, that is well out of order.

YABU to generalise. However, the post office and the parcel-collection place I regularly use both boast staff who are at best distant and at worst downright hostile. You get crap service and excellent service everywhere I know. It's just bad luck that I get the crap stuff in these two places.

I must say I see some fellow customers in the post office sometimes who are miserable, rude or very plainly spoiling for a fight. I don't envy the staff at all.

Rob- many older people do not like and do not trust banks. Or they live in a small village where there is only the post office
My mother will not open a bank account. She has her pensions paid into a Post office account and goes in on a specific day and withdraws it and pays cash for everything. She is 65.

HeidiKat I have worked in a shop as well and used to dread the till roll going!

To answer the question about old people I think that most of them are just used to getting their pension from the PO and reluctant to change.

ExitPursuedByALamb Yes thats the one (Spring Gardens) apparantly its one of the busiest in Britain. Around christmas the queue was always out of the door, we had full staff and we worked with hardly any breaks. I used to deal with rude customers by being extremely nice to them with a huge smile and Yessir, Nossir, threebagsfullsir... rude people hate fake smiley people with a passion. But alas there's nowt they can do about it. :o

littletrees I was also threatened by a guy who tried to cash a stopped giro. He was banned though.

"Rob- many older people do not like and do not trust banks. Or they live in a small village where there is only the post office
My mother will not open a bank account. She has her pensions paid into a Post office account and goes in on a specific day and withdraws it and pays cash for everything. She is 65."
Your mother isn't that old. That sounds like something an 80 year old would do.

I don't use post offices in small villages. I use on in Sheffield city centre where there are plenty of cash points and banks. So I don't know why so many old biddies insist on using the post office! Particularly at lunchtime!