Update from Ebay re the Royal Mail strike action

soolin

I've just had this from ebay, I assume we will all have got it in our messages somewhere

Royal Mail Strike | eBay.co.uk

This appears to be a direct response to the potential 3 days of strikes at various departments and areas within RM next week.

GadgetGuru

May have to switch to DPD for a while as I have a drop off point next to the post office.
3 days a week strike action is crazy!!

KxMx

As I understand it it is more of a rolling strike across various departments. Not a mass 3 day no service everywhere. 
Only Friday will have no deliveries and DO's closed for example.
https://www.royalmail.com/latest-news

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

KxMx said:

As I understand it it is more of a rolling strike across various departments. Not a mass 3 day no service everywhere. 
Only Friday will have no deliveries and DO's closed for example.
https://www.royalmail.com/latest-news

This is what our post lady said today.

Appears the network staff go out on one day, the staff in the mail centres on another and then the delivery staff on the third day.

Not as bad as 3 days of nothing at all but it's obviously designed to cause more of an impact, hopefully the bigger companies will shift mail towards the other couriers and backlogs won't be too bad, for November at least, I think December will be a nightmare, they struggled last year and that was without strikes.  

Brywalker

So let's say you post a letter on Tuesday. It gets sorted in the local hub ready for onward distribution but won't go anywhere because from midnight the hub to hub drivers are on strike.  It will move on Thursday to the local sorting office but won't get sorted for delivery because that section of the workforce are on strike that day but will get sorted locally  for Friday delivery but unfortunately the delivery posties are on strike that day.  So,  if you're lucky it may get delivered on Saturday or Monday.

It's a clever way of maximising disruption without the union members having to miss to many days each

soolin

Brywalker said:

So let's say you post a letter on Tuesday. It gets sorted in the local hub ready for onward distribution but won't go anywhere because from midnight the hub to hub drivers are on strike.  It will move on Thursday to the local sorting office but won't get sorted for delivery because that section of the workforce are on strike that day but will get sorted locally  for Friday delivery but unfortunately the delivery posties are on strike that day.  So,  if you're lucky it may get delivered on Saturday or Monday.

It's a clever way of maximising disruption without the union members having to miss to many days each

It also Maximises confusion as none of us can be entirely sure when our items will move, or where they will get stuck. With an ‘all out’ (or nearly all out) strike one assumes the worst and can inform buyers, but with different bits and different areas being affected a buyer could potentially receive packages from some sellers and not from others.

I’m away anyway so will just put my holiday settings on and look to post from the 7th onwards . 

Brywalker

I too will activate 'Time away' after posting tomorrow's stuff.  

goodfella66

soolin said:

I’m away anyway so will just put my holiday settings on and look to post from the 7th onwards . 

The 3 day rolling strikes are being implemented every week in November. Just different days and a different order of striking departments each week.

soolin

goodfella66 said:

soolin said:

I’m away anyway so will just put my holiday settings on and look to post from the 7th onwards . 

The 3 day rolling strikes are being implemented every week in November. Just different days and a different order of striking departments each week.

I shall worry about the following weeks later , perhaps extend my handling times. About a quarter to a third of my items currently are large letters so I have no courier to swap to and anyway the new seller dashboard doesn't seem to make it easy to do a bulk switch of courier for the parcels. I also suspect that switching to a less popular courier like Evri or perhaps a dearer one will kill sales- either due to it being Evri or due to price, and there are already warnings that other couriers are already overstretched so it might not even help.

I've been selling on Vinted for a few weeks now and there are plenty of warnings there about couriers taking days and days to deliver due to a number of reasons, It isn't usual for my Evri or Yodel parcels to take well over a week to arrive. Also at the moment I think I would rather attempt to deal with RM if something goes wrong, rather than say Evri. I will follow any discussion about this on here and perhaps if other regulars are switching with success I will reconsider my position later.

goodfella66

I don't understand why Ebay don't just increase the expected delivery times. It'd make things a lot easier for everyone.

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

Some info from Royal Mail on what areas are striking and on what dates