Electronnic Spirit Level (Lidl)

[Frank Erskine]

What puzzles me is that RM realise that they are facing increasing competition, yet they _reduce_ their service. I walked past a post box the other day; there was a sticker attached saying that after 28 Oct there will be no more collections on Sundays or Bank Holidays.

Surely if they want to outdo competition they should be having several collections every day.

I have a facsimile of a Year Book for 1902 which indicates at least four house deliveries every day.

And I remember that even in the 1960s you could post a letter at up to

9.00pm here in Sunderland and it would be delivered in, say, London, the next morning.

[Andy Hall]

So here the situation is really that the repair costs £10 including shipping and insurance.

There are plenty of products where the transport forms the lion's share of the price at the end, so 50/50 is fairly good.

[Derek Geldard]

Labour > Hercules > Lake > Teaspoon.

DG

[Andy Hall]

This is yet more evidence of ends not meeting, although with this one, they seem to have figured it out to a degree.

Collecting from a post box has a more or less fixed cost - i.e. guy shows up in a van. Collections made at the weekday probably yield more items - i.e. more revenue.

Does the guy showing up in the van get paid more for Sundays and Bank Holidays?

What action would the customer take if the item he wants to post after lunchtime on a Saturday doesn't get collected until th following Tuesday? Will he go elsewhere? Probably not.

Therefore given all of that, there is little risk of loss of business and a saving in cost.

The question is would people pay more for a Sunday and holiday collection?

[Andy Hall]

I know, which is why I keep coming back to the same conclusion of it being doomed to failure.

[Derek Geldard]

Then she is 100% less competitive at a stroke. Just because of pilferage in the Royal Mail.

I think she would want it approached from the other end. She is complaining that her consignement can be delivered for 40p but without guarantee it will not be pilfered.

If the RM cannot give a guarantee that it will be delivered for less than about a fiver because it may be pilfered en route then that is an issue which should be addressed.

NB AIUI it is only jewellery or cash (or perhaps similar) that the RM will not guarantee to deliver.

DG

[Derek Geldard]

Another one is what would be the cost of making arrangements to properly collect the now enhanced charges for S & H posted mail.

What if it failed to get delivered any earlier than Monday posted mail? As I suspect regularly used to happen.

I've posted before about driving out of the city 5 miles to the main sorting office, as directed by a notice on the postbox, only to find it empty - nobody working except security.

DG

[Dave Liquorice]

Well out on the wilds of the North Pennines I'd be pretty confident that a letter dropped into the box in town before 1630 or the box just down the road by 1605 would be dropping onto a London door mat the next day. Of course it might not be in the morning now as I believe delivery times stretch throughout the day in some areas. Ours arrives around 0900 but I see the same postie finishing his round about 1200 the other side of the valley...

The average punter using a post box doesn't have any real choice. Perhaps if the other competing companies also had some form of universal service obligation on collection and delivery the table would be less tilted in their favour. Note how they all use RM to do the final delivery of their bulk collected mail.

[Owain]

Pitney Bowes were always renowed as being the British Gas of franking machines...

Owain

[Derek Geldard]

Bit late now, but there existed alternatives that were better ?

Our accountants and our insurance brokers are still with Pitney Bowes, and they both say their last renewal of the contract slipped through "On the nod".

DG

[Frank Erskine]

Probably - indeed almost certainly, but this should be catered for by the enhanced income enjoyed by a first-rate service (if such a thing exists).

I would certainly be prepared to pay more for a consistent and efficient service, not that I use RM as a paying customer an awful lot. Deliveries seem to be so inconsistent nowadays. My usual post(wo)man appears three or four times a week, using her own car at times varying from about 08.30 until about 11.00. On other days various postmen turn up - they seem to walk differently (apparently that's quite common in RM), and can deliver at wildly different times. At one time you could almost set your clock by the postie's arrival.

I see RM, a government-owned body, as a service provider rather than a profit-orientated business, not that I have any qualms at all about its service being bettered by the private sector.

[Andy Hall]

Yes, but you wouldn't expect people like that to know any better.....

[Andy Hall]

Alternatively if RM *didn't* have said obligation.

The situation has some interesting parallels with that of the migration of the GPO to Post Office Telephones and ultimately to BT - many of the same characteristics and arguments.

The final delivery by RM is kind of comparable to the local loop copper of BT.

If RM really were that good, they would be able to exact a higher price for that part. While they don't have exclusivity on that side, they do (not sure whether legally or defacto) on postboxes, so they have an advantage there.

It comes back to the same point. If there is a captive audience and if the service is worth having, there is the opportunity and the justification to charge more for it.

[Andy Hall]

I tend to agree with my MP on this one. They should sell shares and raise money.

[Andy Hall]

No she isn't. I'm sure that RM don't single her out for pilferage.

Yes it is. However, how would one do that with an underpaid workforce handling a service in which there is insufficient money to put the monitoring in place to do so?

[djc]

They changed their name in the hope that everyone would no longer remember anything bad about them. A mistake so bad people remember it five years later.

[Dave Liquorice]

Then we wouldn't have any mail service at all, some of the major carrier= s don't deliver out here they drop everything at the local garage and they= deliver it.

AFAIK BT still has a universal service obligation non of the other local= loop providers do and I doubt very much that they will install a line fo= r you for =A3100(ish) if you didn't already have a bit of BT copper.

Maybe that is were the management are going wrong, not realising the val= ue of the national daily delivery to the other providers. Very little of ou= r mail orginates in RM, most comes from one of the other bulk only providers.

Defacto I think, the daily deleviry and post box network are very expensive to run. Do you not think if a private company could make money= out of post boxes they wouldn't be doing it? That's half the trouble the= se days everything has to make a "profit" but some things like a good posta= l service are essential to the running of the economy.

[Andy Hall]

So that represents a business opportunity for the local garage, or village store or newsagent or ......

Exactly. Pricing inappropriate and value not undrstood or demonstrated. One of the classic failings of a state owned enterprise entering the real world. Incompetent management and a workforce not familiar with customer demands.

A good means of delivering information is necessary to the running of the economy but very little needs to be via physical delivery of paper.

If something isn't making money then it is breaking even or losing it. If it's losing money, then it will either close or require a subsidy. If it requires a subsidy, then serious questions should be asked as to whether it is really worth having or should b changed such that it at last breaks even.

[Owain]

I'm not sure about post boxes per se, but AIUI the Royal Mail have a monopoly on public mail of less than £1 postage fee[1], and also on the issue of 'postage stamps'. For a private company to use postboxes open to the public, some form of prepayment system not using postage stamps would need to be worked out.

Owain

[1] Closed schemes like Legalpost / HaysDX are excluded as not open to the public