I can see both sides to this. On the one hand, they’re running a business and doing a lot of extra work to run the post office, which I doubt makes them much money but is sold as a ‘hub of the community feature’ to encourage people into their shop. If they end up doing the extra work but not seeing any extra trade because of it, it must be very galling.
On a similar principle, I remember reading of a man who owned a small convenience shop somewhere in the Midlands right next to a major bus station, which he probably thought would help a lot with footfall; but the buses didn’t take payment by card and also didn’t give change. The sheer volume of people pouring into his shop every day, buying a single 5p sweet with a £20 note and leaving him having to leave the shop and make several daily trips to the bank for more buckets full of change (for which they charged him a fee), led him to not unreasonably refuse to accept notes for under a certain spend amount. Cue loads of abuse from people angry that ‘this nasty, stupid man didn’t want their custom’ when, in reality, each minuscule transaction was costing him considerably.
On the other hand, main post offices, staffed by people specifically paid to offer post office services and nothing else (save for the odd impulse-buy chocolate stand or vending machine), are now dropping like flies, leaving you with few alternative options but to use the one in the corner shop. It’s all very well the crown POs having agreements to take the pre-paid parcels, but that’s not much use if there is no longer a crown PO within 20 miles. Our old main PO is now a pub with a ‘hilarious’ name based on the fact it used to be a PO (I think this is now the law in such cases), and it’s moved to the back of WH Smith. It’s a decent sized one, obviously not staffed by the people who also own it, as a corner shop would probably be, and the PO bit does have its own full-time dedicated staff, so nobody knows nor cares if you don’t spend anything in the actual shop – but now that the culture is to encourage/force people to use their local shop instead, it’s outrageous to be told that this is now where your local post office is, but it’s also the least you can do to buy a few extra things to support the shop, because the PO is being provided as a ‘favour’ to you.
Ebay are being very greedy – and potentially killing the golden goose that already helps them to make a fortune – by not only under-cutting the PO by pennies on the postage, but also by guiding you step by step into buying it from them once you’ve sold an item, so that a lot of sellers probably don’t even realise that you can alternatively just take it to the PO and buy postage there. As a PP said, by the time you’ve bought a printer and then paid for the paper, ink, electricity and sellotape, you’ve probably saved nothing anyway.
I think we all have to be realistic, though, and understand that the Post Office as we have known it for decades is no longer sustainable as it once was. The amount of letters being sent – domestic and business – has plummeted in recent years. Added to that the fact that there are other companies allowed to compete with them and cherry pick the remaining big business contracts on price, yet RM still somehow has to take the letters ‘the last mile’ and do the hardest, most time-consuming part?! The only thing probably keeping RM clinging on is the parcels from everybody’s myriad online orders, but then again, you get the likes of Hermes and DPD looking to take that business from them – choosing to cover the big concentrated population areas, but then whacking on a huge premium to deliver to the Highlands and Islands, NI and other more sparsely-populated areas, or simply refusing to cover them at all – something which the RM (thank goodness) is not legally allowed to do.
RM and the PO are being forced to adapt with the times, but I don’t envy them in the least for the many challenges that they now face, with the double threat of the online age and the many competitors wanting to take their lucrative trade away but leaving them with the no-profit/loss-making parts. Even now, for less than 80p, somebody will collect a letter from very near your home in Truro and put it through the door of your friend’s house in Thurso the next day – and what does everybody do? Moan about what a huge rip-off it supposedly is.