Royal Mail

Paul_Varjak

Royal Mail are no longer on my Xmas card list! Problems started with the Delivery to Neighbour scheme.

Trying to complain to Royal Mail is almost impossible - they say I cannot complain because Ofcom approves the scheme.

Trying to escalate the complaint to the Postal Review Panel is also impossible - I sent them an e-mail but they say I am not using a Royal Mail service so cannot complain.

I have asked Royal Mail to put me through to the Postal Review Panel by phone but they refuse saying they are not customer-facing. So, I tried writing to the Customer Review Panel using the address from the Royal Mail website - but my letter was returned, saying the address was incomplete!

Meanwhile I am still waiting for the Delivery to Neighbour opt-out sticker I ordered on 27 September and on several other days since then. Royal mail staff give various reasons why I have not received the sticker - out of stock, quality control issues and lost in the post!

Completely fed-up with Royal Mail and so is every postie I spoke to. They are now do longer rounds. Delivery office staff are also working longer hours! The customers are unhappy, the staff are unhappy and Royal Mail will soon be unhappy as it is now costing more to deliver mail because of the overtime payments!

MothballsWallet

Ofcom - about as much use as a chocolate fireguard against an ion cannon...

They need to be replaced with a completely different, and useful, regulator that isn't in the pockets of all the companies its supposed to regulate and protect us consumers from.

eco

Can't understand why you haven't received your sticker for opt out, mine took two weeks, and was on the bottom of a letter which just needed peeling off.

Posties do longer rounds, but as the sorting machines have sorted every peice of mail by street posties no longer have to do that, the posties don't have to go back to sorting office to get the rest of the mail it's all in the van so don't have to carry heavy bags, so really it's swings and roundabouts.

Every company changes over time, and we don't always adapt to change very well, but don't have a great deal of choice.

shaun_from_Africa

Couldn't you just make up a temporary sticker until the RM one arrives?

You could print this out and stick it by your letterbox. It's what the "real" one will look like.

Paul_Varjak

shaun_from_Africa wrote: »

Couldn't you just make up a temporary sticker until the RM one arrives?

You could print this out and stick it by your letterbox. It's what the "real" one will look like.

Yes, I provided a link to the sticker a few days ago as Royal Mail seems rather shy in making it available on their website.

Paul_Varjak

eco wrote: »

Can't understand why you haven't received your sticker for opt out, mine took two weeks, and was on the bottom of a letter which just needed peeling off.

Posties do longer rounds, but as the sorting machines have sorted every peice of mail by street posties no longer have to do that, the posties don't have to go back to sorting office to get the rest of the mail it's all in the van so don't have to carry heavy bags, so really it's swings and roundabouts.

Every company changes over time, and we don't always adapt to change very well, but don't have a great deal of choice.

In a competitive market, companies do have to change but a delivery to neighbour scheme is a step too far for me, particularly for a service that is quite rightly regulated and virtually monopolistic.

paddyrg

Paul_Varjak wrote: »

...virtually monopolistic.

Is it though? There are loads of postal service licenses out there, but only RM seems to do the last-mile daily deliveries door to door. I don't believe that's down to anything other than it being a darned expensive inconvenience to do so, otherwise TNT etc would be all over it, as opposed to just topslicing the more lucrtive parcel market. IIRC, RM *has* to deliver mail that other commercial operators have inserted into the mailstream without getting anything like the full benefit of a 50p stamp! By all means, set up a competing national delivery service to the door - perhaps you can beat RM's prices?

In fact, how would it be if RM dumped daily postal delivery and just concentrated on the packages market without the obligation? Would that foster competition and we'd have 3-4 daily deliveries (1 from each private postal company...until they went bust of course) a day to look forward to? Or do you think the service would become massively uneven with the new companies servicing profitable cities and dumping 85% of the country? Perhaps they would have a legal remit to service the whole country...before you could say postagestamp they would consolidate to a single, slow, cheap, minimum service national carrier to do the bulk of the country. Much like Royal Mail actually currently is. Nothing would change, with the possible exception of even more disruption and an even more uneven and fragmented market.

I only pick on this as monopolistic is a bit binary, like being pregnant - you either are or aren't, you cannot be a little bit pregnant or mostly monopolistic.

giraffe69

I only pick on this as monopolistic is a bit binary, like being pregnant - you either are or aren't, you cannot be a little bit pregnant or mostly monopolistic.

A business can show features of a monopoly without being the only one in the market so there are degrees of monopoly. Economists like conversing about just such a topic.

Paul_Varjak

paddyrg wrote: »

I only pick on this as monopolistic is a bit binary, like being pregnant - you either are or aren't, you cannot be a little bit pregnant or mostly monopolistic.

Economists have written papers on the subject and the law recognises degrees of monopoly too.

custardy

eco wrote: »

Can't understand why you haven't received your sticker for opt out, mine took two weeks, and was on the bottom of a letter which just needed peeling off.

Posties do longer rounds,:rotfl: the posties don't have to go back to sorting office to get the rest of the mail it's all in the van so don't have to carry heavy bags, so really it's swings and roundabouts.

Every company changes over time, and we don't always adapt to change very well, but don't have a great deal of choice.

seriously,have you bought into the RM mechanisation pipedream?
trust me,the machines do nowhere near as much as people are led to believe
there is still a lot of manual sorting

Paul_Varjak

My regular postie tried to deliver an item for me to one of my neighbours yesterday! And it was only two days ago that I told that postie there was a special instruction not to deliver to neighbours!!

Not only that but the package contained the words NO NEIGHBOUR DELIVERY (words which are now included as part of my address in all my on-line accounts)

Still waiting for the opt-out stickers from the delivery to neighbour scheme. Royal Mail now tell me these stickers will be sent to me by special delivery! When I spoke to my postie, he had no idea that special delivery items must not be delivered to a neighbour!