post office/royal mail vent

hoppen1

sorry if this is a bit long.

i sell a lot of things on ebay and find myself using the post office mainly to send parcels probably about 20 a week. i usually drive to a post office near where i work but today went to a different one as it was more convernient.

i never normally have any problems whatsovver i pay for my postage online with paypal and then drop the package off at the post office. when i asked at the counter for the tracking for these the staff member said he needed to have a closer look. i passed the package through the hatch and he played around with it a bit before handing it back saying he would not be accepting it!

we had a bit of an exchange as i had three of these parcels and he said they could not accept any of them even though i had already paid for postage. the only reason he could give me was that the packaging did not meet minimum standard.

these were in mailing bags of very good qualty and i never have any problems using them or having them accepted. the excuse he gave was that poorly wrapped items are those that often contain illegal or dangerous goods.

all i can say is i will be using a courier from now on if that is the attitud eof the royal mail! is this some sort of new policy?

lovinituk

It's a Post Office so you can't blame Royal Mail for not accepting them!

This is unfortunately a case of a Postmaster not wanting to handle your parcels because you have already paid for postage and he won't earn anything from it. It's not on really and you probably have grounds for a complaint (not sure who to though).

I know he has been a bit of a pillock but could you not support your local post office by letting them do the postage for you? If it's only 2 or 3 packages a day, surely it won't take that much longer?

hoppen1

lovinituk wrote: »

It's a Post Office so you can't blame Royal Mail for not accepting them!

This is unfortunately a case of a Postmaster not wanting to handle your parcels because you have already paid for postage and he won't earn anything from it. It's not on really and you probably have grounds for a complaint (not sure who to though).

I know he has been a bit of a pillock but could you not support your local post office by letting them do the postage for you? If it's only 2 or 3 packages a day, surely it won't take that much longer?

surely it is illegal for the post office not to accept post?

shaun_from_Africa

It probably is illegal, but if they were to argue that in their opinion it wasn't packed to a satisfactory standard, how could you disprove this?

It does sound like lovinituk said, and that they didn't accept it due to having prepaid postage, but you would never be able to prove this.

Moglex

You should certifiably report this to Post Office Counters head office.

lovinituk

Its not an isolated incident unfortunately. This guy was banned from a post office for trying explain that they had to take his pre-paid mail and even had the police called on him...

http://www.thisisexeter.co.uk/Exeter-post-staff-won-t-man-s-mail/story-11834499-detail/story.html

Crux of the story is that the post office was wrong and Royal Mail had to apologise on the postmasters behalf!

skiddlydiddly

I can see why the OP is annoyed but I can also see the side of the Postmaster as they are afterall running a business not a charity.Royal Mail should still pay them a % and then everyone would be happy.Well, happier.

This was obviously going to cause problems for customers and Post Offices, very short sighted thinking by RM.

Azari

I can certainly sympathise with the sub postmasters.

It would be like a food manufacturer saying that the would sell to people directly but that the goods would be sent to Tesco who would have to hand them over in exchange for a receipt but for no profit. (Sort of.)

It seems that it's RM's fault in the big picture in expecting post offices to do certain work for little or nothing.

In the short term, of course, it was the fault of the people at the post office who should not have involved the customer in their dispute with RM.

ju1i3_2

One thing I found out after poor service at a post office is that some are privately owned - and they can do what they like! I live equidistant between two post offices, one is private and one is run by Post Office Counters. I never go to the private one any more.

I also discovered that Post Office Counters is nothing to do with Royal Mail (their words paraphrased). Now to us customers it seems like the same entity and we should be getting a seamless service but they can be as rude and awkward as they like about it, eg I asked at the counter what time the post was collected at the box outside and he responded, "I have no idea" like it was the stupidest question in the world.

lovinituk

ju1i3 wrote: »

some are privately owned - and they can do what they like!

I don't think thats technically true. They still provide a service on behalf of Royal Mail and I'm sure there are legal agreements that mean they have to meet certain standards, such as taking in pre-paid post, to able to continue.

custardy

ju1i3 wrote: »

One thing I found out after poor service at a post office is that some are privately owned - and they can do what they like! I live equidistant between two post offices, one is private and one is run by Post Office Counters. I never go to the private one any more.

I also discovered that Post Office Counters is nothing to do with Royal Mail (their words paraphrased). Now to us customers it seems like the same entity and we should be getting a seamless service but they can be as rude and awkward as they like about it, eg I asked at the counter what time the post was collected at the box outside and he responded, "I have no idea" like it was the stupidest question in the world.

well do people not watch the news?
Post Office counters is a separate entity(though comes under the RM group)
in fact it will soon be totally separate with RM being privitised
as for collections
thats down to RM and collections change
the PO would only have interest in their collections
the rights and wrongs of how the PO acted to the OP is an issue however its of little surprise when RM cut the amounts paid to PO's for pre paid mail