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My good lady wife pointed out something that is worth thinking about.

The post office has closed a lot of its rural/smaller branches.

Now they have TV adverts with expensive actors asking us to use the post office.

There must be some pretty pissed off people out there.

There are !

Not least the Post Office staff and the posties!

BikerGran wrote:Not least the Post Office staff and the posties!

Yup - I'm pissed off

Royal who?

Oh THAT lot.. the ones who charge extortionately for services they fail to deliver (pun intended)

But Hey, never mind...

UPS and the like should go into 'proper' competition. they'd make a fortune.

Firstly I should declare an interest.... I am a postman.

I would love to see the competition (UPS , Citylink etc.) go into 'proper competition'. They would be bankrupt in weeks!

The only reason they are able to 'compete' now is that they are subsidised by RM delivering their shite for a pittance. They have no delivery infrastructure even remotely capable of handling millions of small items (letters) to millions of addys every day.

OK they can offer a parcel/package service but they are mostly a joke at that too. OK when it comes to regular high volume stuff but totally lost when asked to find little Mrs X out in the sticks.

I know RM make mistakes - I make my fair share - but it's nothing like as bad as the media like to claim and if you are honest I am sure you will be able to think of far more occasions when you could have thought...."fuck me - that was quick" or " how the hell did they find me with that crap addressing" or " I can't even read that handwriting" than occasions where they screwed up.

During the strike I had ONE package due. It was given to Citylink at enormous cost and they failed to even attempt delivery. Left me a message on the phone saying they couldn't find me - but left no contact number. I had to ride into Ipswich to collect it where I joined a frustrated queue of similarly pissed off people. Never have any problem with the usual Parcelforce delivery.

I'll get off me box now....

If Citylink DID offer proper competition, I would most definately use them. It would be nice to have that viable option. RM have been too far up themselves for too long as a method of delivering mail and parcels.

Delivering to little Mrs 'X' isnt that hard. It's not RM's doing, it's the people on the ground who know the area. with the same infrastructure of local employees, any business could manage that after a few years of building up close community ties.

Oh and BTW it's not 'their shite' that's MY shite theyre delivering.

Well if I ever discover I'm delivering any of 'your shite' I shall be sure to lose it

And don't tar everyone with the Citylink brush!

My other half used to deliver for DHL and he was GOOD!

Well you did marry him. So I guess he cant have been that bad or you'd have let him go when he'd dropped the parcel off

That sounded so much better in my head.

Can't really see any other delivery service picking up the "social need" side of deliveries of low value items to small remote communities - just not worth their while. I'm glad the GPO subsidise this within their total business.

As for ShittyLink - I would never willingly use them after a particularly bad experience. Ordered an LCD monitor for my son a few years ago before he went to uni. I ordered it from Aria - a company I'd used many times before. Well, it never turned up. Many letters and emails later not resolved I drove to Manchester to confront them. They admitted they'd had problems with things going missing with CityLink. Promised to sort it out. They didn't. Never got it sorted and ended up a couple of hundred quid out of pocket. Never used Aria or CityLink since. Maybe unfair on one bad experience but the effort I went to to sort it out and the attitude of those 2 companies to fob me off has made me determined never to use them again.

A friend in London who, ironically, was working for a courier company at the time, ordered chain and sprockets from a company in Wales, they were consigned via Citylink and never turned up. So the comany sent a second set (also via Citylink - pattern developing here) which never turned up either. We know the chap in Wales so we know they were sent!

Robert (Bob) Thomas started City Link and up until about 5 years ago was a customer of ours. He told me that he thought that when Initial/Group 4 got their mitts on it it'd go pear shaped (that was about 15 years ago)

Kwackerz, please don’t take this the wrong way but not only are you posting shite via Royal Mail, your doing the same thing on this thread as well.
Royal Mail is regulated by a very strict set of guidelines that govern not only how much we can charge but also the quality of service we have to achieve. These conditions have been imposed on us by Postcom and if we fail to meet their targets we are fined very heavily.
This means when you give your shite posting to someone like TNT or UK mail, we are restricted to how much we can charge them to process and deliver it, we actually lose money on the deal and if we don’t deliver it on time we get fined, so as you can imagine Royal Mail are always very keen on quality of service figures.
The other problem is if you don’t work within the business you really don’t have any comprehension of the quantity of mail we handle.
In my section (LSM’s) there are 17 of us and we tip, sort and dispatch on average 600,000 items a night. The next day delivery target is about 97%, that means 18,000 people a day might be unhappy with us and start writing mr Angry letters or posting on forums but 582,000 people don’t even give us a thought.

There i feel better for that