How bad is Royal Mail?

[DavidS]

There has been much comment recently on the apparent poor service offered by Royal Mail. It is difficult to gage how bad it is. My only personal experience is that I have notice that a magazine I have posted to me first class from Surrey on a Wednesday afternoon, always used to arrive Thursday morning, now it usually comes on Friday. However many people seem to suffer a far worse service than that, with important or valuable mail going missing regularly. It seems even good postmen/women are more inclined to put mail ito the wrong address than used to be the case. Is this because they are expected to deliver so much crap along with the stuff we actually want to get?

[jj]

It's mainly beacuse their morale, pay, and conditions of service are so bad.
If you don't as a company instil pride in, and take pride in, your staff, why should they give a flying fuck?
PO 'management' is and has long been pointlessly confrontational, aggressive, incompetent, duplicitous and downright dishonest, and their policy of savagely cutting costs and sacrificing quality of service by the mass introduction of casual labour has had the unfortunate effects detailed by last week's doco........

I stopped working for them many years ago, when I realised which way the business was going.
Down the pan- and it's nothing to do with the Internet, either.

[DavidS]

I believe the industry regulator has not helped. Apparently keeping the cost of a stamp below the cost of delivering the letter for far too long. I think most people would be happy to pay slightly more for a genuine first class service.

[steve56]

its terrible here in london i sent 2 cassette tapes off to a lady in nottingham but she never recieved them,also sent 1 video off to a regular here on the forum but it never arrived it seems to me even if you send recorded or special it dosent always arrive either.

[DavidS]

I lived in London up to 1998 and it was dreadful then. It's better here in Devon but far from perfect. I was expecting a package from Switzerland today which hasn't turned up. I think it might have been delivered next door and they're away on holiday!

[steve56]

sometimes i find them on the mat outside the door ,even the recorded ones other times the video is put through the letter box.

[colin]

totally agree jj, i worked for the post office for 15 years up until 1995 and things were bad then for staff, they seem to have got even worse. i'm glad i took redundancy when i did.

[colin]

i believe a major problem now is the use of casual labour to deliver the mail, i seem to have a different postman every other day!!

[woodgnome]

since making this post the situation has, if anything, deteriorated even further. i'm now asking people to post me stuff using the wrong address, as it will probably have a statistically better chance of actually getting to me.

[jj]

That's certainly true......and in the early 90s, IIRC, the PO were making a small but steady annual profit. The govt. then said, we'll have that, ta', and a few years later had the incredible cheek to decide to privatise them for not re-investing in the business !!
My long-suffering ex-colleagues still try their best against hopeless odds, but they are leaving in droves to better themselves, more in sadness than anger.
But not MUCH more...............and when I see that shiftless cunt Crozier (salary: enormous, contribution to the PO's problems: likewise) dismissing the idea that there is the slightest thing wrong, I want to scream.

And so, I do.
My neighbours are getting a petition up.....................