Royal Mail Efficiency!

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gramps

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[RANT]
So my battery pack was posted on 14th and arrived today (21st) - 7 days to get 1/2 way across the UK! My tripod took almost as long 1st Class recorded and the RMSD package I sent on Thursday turned up late with the buyer.

Having failed to receive the battery pack I telephone the local depot to complain and was told that my local driver was on holiday so his work was being shared by 10 other drivers who did my area after their own area had been completed ... in their own time ... if they had time!

You couldn't make it up could you - is it any wonder they're in trouble?
[/RANT]
 
Absolutely Pants :thumbsdown: since going to a single delivery a few years ago our mail was always delivered by about 8.30am which meant if I was expecting something I could hang around for a while before setting off for work. Waited in the other morning (on a day off) and nothing arrived, was a little put out when at 15:40 the doorbell rang and it was a new Postie with the item I had been expecting. I asked why so late and he said that they had reduced the number of rounds and mine had been split between two and would be done after the Postie had finished their original round and would always now be around 3:30pm.

What makes it worse is they have reduced the staff at the desk in the sorting office to one person :bang: so when you go the next day to get your package there is always a queue, took me 15 minutes yesterday to get a package which would have taken less than 5 minutes previously.

Service, what service?
 
Well if RM have to keep delivering the likes of TNT mail at a loss, they have to make savings elsewhere. Don't just moan here, contact your MP and let them know that RM needs to be given the same chance as every other commercial company to make a profit.
 
My own weekly Royal Mail quibble...

I bought a lens from a seller on TP and it arrived on Wednesday. No-one in to collect it and so it returned to the sorting office a good, ooh, 5 minute walk from my house. Went to collect it the next morning only to be told I had to wait 72 hours! The postman needed to walk from my house to the sorting office and drop it into the caller's office. A 30-minute job at tops!

Not to mention that mail never arrives before 9.45 a.m any more. I am all for allowing private companies to begin house-to-house deliveries as Royal Mail is just a shocking organisation.
 
More than anything, I'm impressed "am" (as in ante meridiem) is even used to talk about postal deliveries... count yourselves lucky!
 
they are advertising a job local to me and it is for 6 hours a week on a saturday
collecting the mail from the mailboxes wtf who makes these decisions for them
 
Don't get me started......

We have had to change the way we work because mail is delivered around 1315. We used to receive and process mail in the early morning as some would then have to be despatched via DX. So the run to the DX was usually made mid/late morning to deliver and collect. Now we have to collect from the DX mid morning and go back again mid/late afternoon to deliver after the incoming mail has been processed. That's an extra 9 mile trip due to the inefficiencies of Royal Fail.

Oh, and we have a PO Box in Gloucester which is delivered (rather than collected). Not for the first time, we have received a letter correctly addressed to the same PO Box number but in Cheltenham. We mark the envelope in large letters 'Try Cheltenham!' and put it in the post box. It still gets delivered to us again..... and again. It's sitting in my mail out tray for the third time.
 
yep another :thumbsdown: from me - absolute crap , most recently we had the whole helga the holga saga over on F&C where shee took nearly two months to get from devon to crewe - so long that we assumed she was missing in action
 
Astraeus said:
Not to mention that mail never arrives before 9.45 a.m any more. I am all for allowing private companies to begin house-to-house deliveries as Royal Mail is just a shocking organisation.
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It's just finding one that wants to that's the problem.
As things stand Royal Mail are the only ones that have to deliver to every address in the United Kingdom, the rest can pick and chose
 
Gremlin said:
It's just finding one that wants to that's the problem.
As things stand Royal Mail are the only ones that have to deliver to every address in the United Kingdom, the rest can pick and chose
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Indeed. My personal take is that the postal system as it stands requires a serious readjustment and a rethink as to what service it is required to provide. I see very little need for the continued door-to-door service as affected by the Royal Mail and I am far more inclined toward a Post Office central service where people collect their mail from a central location - all this would require is a Mail Box Etc. type of setup in every village or in every postcode.

I understand it would leave a few people behind (the elderly and infirm) but it may be that the savings effected by such a wholesale change would amply fund subsidies to have house deliveries for those who need it (or those who still want to pay for it).

Given how easy it is for us all to travel these days, it is not too much to ask for 95% of us to collect our post on a daily or twice-daily basis from a regional post office. Additionally, very few home deliveries have anything time-sensitive in them.
 
never had any bother personally, ive sent out about 40 packages this week from an ebay clearout and generally theyre arriving next day but certainly within the 3-4 working days 1st recorded states.
 
That maybe so but 1st Class used to be 1-2 days, they have just changed all their SLAs to suit their changes.
 
EdBray said:
That maybe so but 1st Class used to be 1-2 days, they have just changed all their SLAs to suit their changes.
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recorded has always taken longer than standard 1st, dont know why exactly but as far back as i remember it has been.

changes like higher throughput maybe? now that a lot more business is done online i can only think that may be the case. along with higher costs from wages and fuel, somethings got to give.
 
Nobody can or will do what RM do, ask ANY other service to delivery a letter from Penzance to Stromness on Orkney for 42 pence and see what they say.

Royal Mail offer a truly remarkable service.
 
Well I can only give Royal Mail a pat on the back.

Bought some 20M of LAN cable and a 100M drum of aerial cable from different ebay sellers on Wednesday night.

LAN through the door before 8.30am on Friday with the drum arriving in the afternoon.

Both were postage free, via 1st class standard.
 
i missed a parcel on friday card said give 24 hours before collecting so i did went down today to be told it would be 48 hours before i could collect it as they didnt have it

great why not tell me that in the first place so i made a comlaint not so bothered about the time its the fact they say one thing so i go out of my way to collect and its not bloody there
 
Cant complain about the service over here its great fast and if im out i still have it left in a safe place or a neighbours house.
 
whiteflyer said:
Nobody can or will do what RM do, ask ANY other service to delivery a letter from Penzance to Stromness on Orkney for 42 pence and see what they say.

Royal Mail offer a truly remarkable service.
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on the other hand email can do it in a couple of seconds and as near to free as makes no odds

this is the royal mails problem , they are okay on letters which are dying out, but truly crap with parcels which are not - because physical goods can't be sent by electronic means.

the only thing stopping them dying out totally is that the only other options like DHL and HDLN are no better
 
You know what, even though I work for them and it would mean me losing my job, the rate people moan about RM I would love to see them shut down and then see how much people would moan at the cost of getting their letters, parcels etc. delivered to out of town places, if anyone would deliver.
Careful what you wish for, you just might get it !!!
 
At least parcels might actually get to the right destination... Of ten parcels ive sent in the last 3 months 8 have either been seriously delayed (by which I mean weeks not days) or have gone totally missing. (the whole Helga saga was the last straw as far as i'm concerned)


Personally i could care less if the royal mail dispeared tommorow as i've already given up on using them for anything important - letters and documents go by email, bills get paid at banks or online, and parcels go by UPS where possible and DHL as last resort - yes it costs more but at least they actually arrive at the right address, undamaged, and within the same week or so that they are sent.
 
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Our postie arrives around 4pm, but as previously said for the price its fantastic, the conditions he works in to deliver junk mail is simply crazy.
 
I have no problems with them at all. At least I know that if they can't deliver something then it will be taken back to the local sorting office and I can collect the day after. Most often than not they deliver very quickly. Far better than any of the private carriers.

And no... I don't, and never have worked for them
 
You can only collect after they have attempted a delivery, if they don't deliver for 7 days there's nothing you can do. If they can deliver after giving them a rocket they can deliver on time!
 
^^^ Very true. I think that if they hadn't delivered in a week and I was waiting for something then I'd be pretty frustrated with them too!

All I can say is that on the whole, around here, they aren't bad. That doesn't help you of course :'(
 
I have to question RM when they returned my birth certificate to me 6 months late. Bad enough in itself, but it had been sent recorded/to be signed for.

There was a scribbled note on it - "signed for by posty".
 
I've had fantastic service from RM lately. Twice last week I posted letters from London late in the afternoon, one to Dorset, one to Manchester. Both got there the following morning.
 
At last, I received the letter sent to me on 28th November, delivered to no 81 in the next road to me. The house was empty but the estate agent brought it round to me this afternoon. Well done to the Real Estate Agency for doing the Royal Mail's job.:razz::razz::razz::razz::razz:
 
I have to say that yes, I have plenty of occassions where I could quite gladly throttle anyone wearing an RM uniform, like the ninja deliveries [you know, we are at home, with 2 yappy terriers that can hear a mouse snuffling in the next postcode, but apparently there was no one in to sign for it] and when posted stuff just vanishes into the great postbox in the sky, like the daily delivery that can be anytime between 8am and 3.45pm, etc - but, given the relatively low costs and more often than not reliability, I think we could be much worse off.

Going to the 'central collection' idea, it would drive me mad personally, I would rather pay a little more to have a delivery, but of course, in many cases, it wouldn't be me that decided, it would be the person posting and I can predict all manner of problems with that. Also, as an example, take where we live. We live very near one sorting office, that is open 7am to 7pm, all day saturday, and has some parking nearby. However, it is not our sorting office, we are right on the boundary where London postcodes become Hertfordshire ones, and that office is hertfordshire but we are London - no, our sorting office is twice as far away, has no parking within half a mile any day between 7am and 6.30pm and its opening hours? 8 - 12.30 and 9-12 on a saturday - so if you work 'normal' hours and ergo are unlikely to be around to receive a delivered parcel, you can imagine what that 3 hours is like on a saturday morning! Not to mention the amount of money the local council must rake in from the traffic wardens hiding in the hedgerows nearby :bonk: You wont stop people using their cars, especially if they need to collect daily or it is a larger or heavier parcel [I am not sure I could carry a big wedding album home from ours, I would need one of those shopping bags on wheels, and whilst I know I am old, I don't feel quite that old, yet! :lol: ] so such a service would require both parking at every office [almost impossible in London and the centres of other major cities] and proper opening hours, as in, late nights and weekends....
 
After some health problems a few years ago, I have been using a fibre supplement which I get through the internet. I had to order some more on monday and it arrived this morning - can't be bad. I know that some credit must also go to the supplier for despatching the order so promptly but most credit has to go to the men in the red lorries.
 
Standard Parcel posted on Thursday, received on Saturday :thumbs:
 
Yv said:
I have to say that yes, I have plenty of occassions where I could quite gladly throttle anyone wearing an RM uniform, like the ninja deliveries [you know, we are at home, with 2 yappy terriers that can hear a mouse snuffling in the next postcode, but apparently there was no one in to sign for it] and when posted stuff just vanishes into the great postbox in the sky, like the daily delivery that can be anytime between 8am and 3.45pm, etc - but, given the relatively low costs and more often than not reliability, I think we could be much worse off.

Going to the 'central collection' idea, it would drive me mad personally, I would rather pay a little more to have a delivery, but of course, in many cases, it wouldn't be me that decided, it would be the person posting and I can predict all manner of problems with that. Also, as an example, take where we live. We live very near one sorting office, that is open 7am to 7pm, all day saturday, and has some parking nearby. However, it is not our sorting office, we are right on the boundary where London postcodes become Hertfordshire ones, and that office is hertfordshire but we are London - no, our sorting office is twice as far away, has no parking within half a mile any day between 7am and 6.30pm and its opening hours? 8 - 12.30 and 9-12 on a saturday - so if you work 'normal' hours and ergo are unlikely to be around to receive a delivered parcel, you can imagine what that 3 hours is like on a saturday morning! Not to mention the amount of money the local council must rake in from the traffic wardens hiding in the hedgerows nearby :bonk: You wont stop people using their cars, especially if they need to collect daily or it is a larger or heavier parcel [I am not sure I could carry a big wedding album home from ours, I would need one of those shopping bags on wheels, and whilst I know I am old, I don't feel quite that old, yet! :lol: ] so such a service would require both parking at every office [almost impossible in London and the centres of other major cities] and proper opening hours, as in, late nights and weekends....
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You can have mail redivered to a local Post Office at a charge of £1.50 http://www.royalmail.com/delivery/inbound-mail/redelivery/details
 
I work for them and I have to agree my office is very far from perfect, they are having a major re-jig of jobs and all the old postman/women don't like the change, that's why when you do a job search it's for stupid hours etc, it on the other hand I had a photobook from photobox going missing and a wedding dress that was posted on the 25th Jan not turned up yet.
 
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Yep as i thought nothing wrong where i live,Someone posted something to me from Glasgow and got it the next morning.
 
Royal Mail is for letters only (even then I prefer to send an email)

Everything else is by courier.
 
Interesting read......The french postal system ( La Poste) is pretty much a hit and miss affair too ...sometimes works ok, then other times it's hopeless as has been found out by a couple of TP members from whom I've purchased bits from on here.
Somewhat irritating ( although not surprising) is how La Poste will hold Royal Mail responsible for any delays/losses etc with mail to/from the UK even if the item hasn't even got out of France!!!
The same attitude comes from Royal Mail that La Poste is responsible for an item that is being sent to france yet is still sat in a UK sortring office!!!!!!
To be fair this problem is not with every item but it is nonetheless frequent enough.
One thing that is very interesting is items sent from the UK as international signed for....very rarely have I had to sign for an item either at my door or upon collection from the P.O. Makes one wonder if paying the additional signed for option is worth it :shrug:
 
My wife sent her tax return first class to HMRC with a week to spare... Took over a week to arrive resulting in a £100 fine. Yes, she should have used recorded delivery or even done it online but a week for first class letters to go across the country is beyond a joke. On the other hand, our local postie is a nice lad. He actually runs between houses to get the job done quicker.
 
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