Obv I don’t want to get too deep into privatisation weeds as we don’t want to get into the dreaded (whispers) politics in this comm. But I’m interested to know if other people are noticing the postal service deteriorating.
Mail for other houses (my door number is clearly marked)… delivery timelines missed… then the icing on the cake, had a delivery that was supposed to come up to Newcastle delivered while I’m not at home, they left it in a ‘safe place’ despite one not being designated.
Want to hear what the ‘safe place’ was? Out on the street, jammed behind a random neighbours wheelie bin! So yeah that’s £110 of new clothes gone to some lucky local who swiped it. Boooo, Royal Mail, booooo!
To counteract the whinge, I just made a banging pizza almost from scratch. Success!
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Worked for royal mail as postie for nearly 15 years now, was an incredible job and a decent company to work for but now they are racing to become Amazon whilst also trying to ger rid of the uso ( government agreed 6 day a week mail service that hits targets) we are tracked and given more work than possible and they are now bringing in a new workforce on terrible contracts for less money. Our strikes did nothing because the company is rogue asf.
Wow. It’s very interesting / illuminating to hear from a postie on this issue. Thanks for all your years of service, for what it’s worth I respect the fuck out of you. It’s such an important job.
My usual postlady is fantastic but recently we’ve had a new guy, he returns the cheery ‘hello’ with a glare and a grunt. And I presume is responsible for the recent cockups… but I’ll temper my annoyance because from the sounds of it, they’re massively taking the piss out of you all.
I don’t really think it’s possible to talk about the decline and asset stripping of Royal Mail without breaking the no politics rule. It’s dimise has been caused by ideology.
That said, it sounds like I’ve been lucky to have a decent postie.
You’re not wrong. Postal deliveries in my area are, at best, sporadic. I’d say my area gets deliveries maybe two or three times a week at most.
Well it’s good to know it’s not all in my head. On the one hand, it’s nice not to get spam shoved through the letterbox everyday… always felt sorry for the postie as when I asked one day why they ignored my ‘no leaflets’ letterbox sticker, they said they are ordered to deliver the spam leaflets. But it’s really noticeable that the deliveries are spaced out now. Lucky for me I rarely have anything important coming via snailmail.
Never had the sort of shenanigans you’re talking about, but there’s definitely been a decline in service – late deliveries, posties racing the clock, and a general sense of perpetual crisis.
Homemade pizza is something else though. Love a nice thin and crispy margherita straight from the oven.
Yep, apparently up here (Newcastle) they’re given a minimum time to do each street. Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s a national thing as the new company tries to make it as profitable as possible, poor postmen and women are suffering the same crap as Amazon drivers most likely.
Back to the pizza… I’ve made my own sauce in the past (it was meh), not sure if you’ve seen in your supermarket but Heinz now do passata, was pretty good.
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undefined> Postman to be paid for performance. Postman to be paid for performance. I don’t think that works.
If it did, flyers and phonebooks (back when they were a thing) wouldn’t be found dumped in hedges in bulk. Post is a little different, but not that much. and there have been many cases where bags and bags of undelivered mail have been found stashed in postmen’s homes because they couldn’t be arsed to deliver them.
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The problem is - except for tracked parcels, nothing is traced and there’s so many ways for something to go missing between sender and recipient. Hard to measure performance if you can’t rely on that.
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Because postboxes mean no origination, or at least, none that can get back to the poster.
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BTW I just noticed your username… that’s the punchline to my favourite awful joke ('What do you call a Frenchman in sandals?"), don’t think I’ve ever seen it in the wild before!
Who is going to pay for evening deliveries for households?
“Performance goals” sound good on paper but don’t work and would introduce extra cost. Delivery time would require all post to be tracked, which would take extra time (=cost) at delivery. To track successful deliveries, you’d need a complaints procedure that’s simple enough to be widely used, and staffed well enough to check up on a subset of complaints so to not lead to unfair punishment.
Instead of all this extra complexity that would make posties lives worse, we could just do what we did before - pay them reasonably well and hire enough of them so they can do their job properly. 🤷🏼♂️
Just like everyone else right now, posties are overworked, underpaid and crippled by “targets”.
Initially I was going to lodge a complaint. I’m in two minds after a few days stewing on it, on the one hand I sympathise with anyone in the situation you describe. OTOH, they’re clearly not doing their job properly and potentially cost me £105. All they had to do was put it back in their trolley, and whatever process is required to lodge it back at the depot. Though perhaps management has made that process fiddly and they CBA.
Despite what I said, you should 100% make a claim. You’ve lost out. It may or may not be the postie’s fault, but you don’t deserve to be out of pocket.
I just got home, went round to ask if neighbour has it. He sent his son to the door who said his dad is in a ‘meeting’. I explained situation, he said he’d pass it on… he hasn’t come round so either has it and isn’t giving it back, or doesn’t have it.
ASOS actually emailed me today to check the situation, and offered me a replacement w/ express shipping or a full refund, which imo is excellent customer service considering it’s (mostly) not their fault. I appreciate that bigtime, sometimes it feels you have to really battle nowadays to get a resolution to something like this.
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Bloody terrible for me. I don’t get deliveries for weeks at a time, and then I get a whole load all at once. Not fit for purpose.
I had a letter today with the postman’s boot print on it. That is all.
Ha, that’s funny (though I’m sorry for the state of your letter, hope it wasn’t too important / stained through)
We’re rural, and often postman and couriers are the only people we see day to day, so we build a good relationship with them. It’s a 20 minute trip to the closest postbox, so they often pick up our outgoing parcels too (I sell stuff through ebay so there’s quite a few)
Two years ago our postie of 12 years said he was leaving because there wasn’t enough staff, deadlines were too tight and management wasn’t coping well. Local POs closing, even our regional sorting office closed and went elsewhere. Deliveries were missed, booked pickups too. The worst was when they came to collect a parcel, but it had been collected the day before. Instead they took one clearly marked “Hermes” from outside our house and only having the Hermes label, which was a £90 car heater I’d just sold. I immediately rang the number but despite the lady trying to trace him down, it vanished. If I hadn’t had caught him on cctv I’d never have known where it had gone. I lost all that money, including the Hermes fee.
We had a few random postmen since then, changing every week, but now have settled down to a regular one and we’re lucky in that he’s one of the great ones who goes out of his way to be helpful. He’s also a biker so we have have that in common too.
That’s sad to hear, someone dedicated has left because of the new changes. Absolutely insane that someone can just blatantly swipe your item, in uniform, on camera and there was no satisfactory resolution for you. Not surprised to hear that Hermes wouldn’t help you out, it probably is sat in their depot to this day (imo they’re one of the worst of a bad bunch).
Pleased to hear you have a good postie again!
What I hate is that companies can pay to have posties deliver their junk mail to you, and you have to jump through a lot of hoops to ‘opt out’.
You’re ‘opted in’ by default, of course… 🤬
We had great success just putting up a little sign on the door that said “no unaddressed mail”.
Of course since we were buying a custom sign for it we also added “…or else”, and one time I just happened to open the door after a young lad had pushed a leaflet through. He sort of stepped backwards a bit and his eyes went down to the sign and he stuttered “I’m so sorry I didn’t see the sign” as if he thought I was about to wallop him.
Bless.
I opted out multiple times and still get the junk mail. Feel sorry for the posties having to lug all that pointless weight around that just goes straight into the recycling!
Our postman refuses to ring the bell for some reason, but otherwise I find them fairly reliable.
I definitely used to feel somewhat comforted when I knew a package I’d ordered online was being delivered by RM, cos I could usually trust that it would be on time and in one piece. The last, I don’t know, five or six things I’ve ordered that have been delivered by RM have been delivered literally up to a week later than the timeline. Gimme DPD or DHL anyday.
I haven’t experienced too many issues with post being lost, but delivery times have definitely got a lot worse over the years.
Once upon a time you could post a local letter in the morning and it would be delivered that afternoon. Now it seems lucky if anything gets there the same week.
No issues in my area, sorry.
I don’t get much from RM tbh, but with work a lot of letters we send out go undelivered. Usually parcel deliveries aren’t awful, but our neighbour is quite good.
I wonder how much of that is RM, and how much is people not updating their address. I’ve rented the same property for ~13 years and still get mail for other people every now and then!
