Electronnic Spirit Level (Lidl)

[Clive George]

Did your wife run off with a postie at some point? It would explain your almost rabid dislike of them...

cheers, clive

[Andy Hall]

No not at all. I don't dislike individuals, per sec, but think about what it has become.

- Ex state owned "business" where the middle management believes that it is still in some kind of cotton wool protected environment and hands out policy for execution at the customer facing end that is sheer nonsense. What other business keeps its customers standing in the pouring rain for 30 mins in order to have the privilege of doing business with it? A complete nonsense.

- A demotivated workforce that is desperately underpaid and which knows that probably 80% of what it delivers goes straight in the bin.

- A few "leaders" of said workforce who still believe that the state should provide. It doesn't, won't and shouldn't. Rather sadly, the workforce follows this, including withdrawal of labour, because there is nothing else to go for. It won't get them anywhere because the cupboard is close to bare.

- Some idealists who still believe in the idea of universal services funded from taxation. That was past its sell-by date by 1970, and has no relevance in today's world at all, especially not in the area of delivery services.

- A customer base who still expects something for practically nothing.

34p (or whatever it is now) for a standard item of first class mail. Where does that come from? It's ridiculously low. If an item of mail doesn't justify a delivery charge of at least a pound, probably two, then it has too little value to justify sending. This is about the price range for the current Recorded Signed For service. That should be the bare minimum. What is the point in sending something if you don't really know whether it got there or not? Waste of time. If it doesn't justify that, then it's not worth having. Above this product there is Special Delivery in the £4-5 range which at least offers an attempt at a delivery time.

The sensible thing to do would be to dump all the low priced services (i.e. anything less than a pound) and to see what proportion of customers will pay the more realistic market rate and which won't do so. That would identify what is the sound and reasonably sustainable business and to dump the bullshit.

This would reduce the workforce of RM, but that is untenable anyway, and would provide a more sustainable long term business that can support its workforce properly.

What clearly is not going to work is a low ASP customer base and a workforce with unrealistic expectations.

Hence my point.

I would buy the 34p product if I could be assured of timely delivery and knowing that it arrived. That can't be done for 34p and as soon as there is any uncertainty because of industrial action, that's it, game's off.

I have bought the £4-5 service because generally it works OK and there is tracking. The value of what I send is not intrinsically great, but would cost a fair amount in terms of time if I have to replicate it. Generally that's a reasonable bet and has worked. Again, with the uncertainty of delivery, I am not going to waste my time on it in future. It's cheaper in terms of actual cost and time to use a taxi or motor bike courier.

In the end, and coming back to the point, if a product or service is worth having, it's worth paying for. Otherwise forget it.

[Clive George]

The entertainment business? Though I've never had the experience of your post office - IME they're rather better. Ie I've never had to queue in the pouring rain like you have, and nor do I expect to have to do so in the future, despite living in an area where there's more rain than you get.

That's assuming all post is for business purposes. Consider what's sent around the busiest time of year for RM. Also postcards still exist, and work well. And that's just my particularly restricted use. I don't want signed-for delivery on that sort of thing, I just want something reasonably priced and reliable - which IME we have.

cheers, clive

[Andy Hall]

I took the trouble to email them and received a reply from some junior dweeb who clearly only had a page of standard answers, a blindfold and a pin; because I got a completely stupid answer. I mailed them back and asked for a more considered reply and asked what they were going to do. The answer was well wrapped in bureaucratic red tape as befits a government department. I gave up at that point.

Yes, all of this is lovely but if you take the revenue from that piece of business and look at the cost of implementation, does it pay? I'm sure it doesn't, which is one reason why RM is having trouble making ends meet. Their mix of products isn't priced correctly.

When you have that situation, there are only five ways that I can think of to fix it.

- tell the employees that they can have less, not more money. I don't think that that will work

- withdraw the service. You say that you want it.

- increase the price of the basic service. There is little extra cost in securing a signature at the door in comparison with the logistics cost, so the real cost is closer to £1 than 34p. Would you be willing to pay £1 per item?

- subsidise the 34p service from higher value services. Won't work because it's easy for others to compete without giving subsidies.

- subsidise from taxation. We came from there and it didn't work then.

The Christmas argument doesn't fly either. If you increase the volume of something that makes low margin or a loss but has a requirement to increase the cost base, it only makes it worse.

All of this stuff is childrens' business studies. The fact that RM hasn't worked it out yet, indicates to me that they never will. That's why I make the point that we might as well move directly to the end game and shut them down. As it is, all that is happening is a rather long, painful and pathetic death.

[Andy Hall]

Except that it's a circular argument. Would the businesses think the same if the price was at a more viable level?

But does it for granny's book token to little Willy?

There's nothing in principle wrong with having this as long as it is priced correctly. If the postman are not being paid enough - and I tend to agree, that they are not, then it means that either there's not enough money going in at the front end or it's being wasted in the middle, possibly both.

I suppose it depends on what you are doing. For example, if you are sending out a mailshot to 1000 recipients in the expectation of a

5% response anyway, it may not matter if some go adrift. If it's a software update to customers on a contract then those that don't receive it may be dogged off and not renew next year and you might not know. Perhaps there's a way around that.

[Tony Bryer]

One would like to think that they know that it's this mail that keeps them in work. And one presumes that the businesses who send it do so because it makes them money and is considered a more effective way of marketing than the alternatives.

It's ridiculously low in rural areas (considering the likely cost of collecting *and* delivering mail) but urban->urban mail makes money, even more so when it comes from businesses like us who send virtually everything with printed and postcoded addresses and pay for our postage online. But the one party you can rely on not to interfere with the universal service obligation is the Conservatives so nothing will change here.

We spend about £3,500 p.a. on postage and, current strike apart, reckon it to be a mighty good service. The strike is costing us serious money though, some of which we may not pick up later.

[Clive George]

Um, there's quite a large increase in cost. Consider an urban round - unlike couriers, the postie will have mail for most of the street, so the difference between "in the letterbox" and "ring, wait, get signature, ..." is significant. A courier doing say 20 drops is rather different to a postie doing a few hundred, and the cost reflects that.

Yes, the post model relies on lots of people using it.

Is it just RM you hate, or are all the equivalents in other countries also on your hit list?

cheers, clive

[Andy Hall]

No, it's generic I think.

The US Postal Service can't even manage to provide tracking for an item which has been sent using a premium tracking service that they claim to offer. I've had three items over a couple of years that go missing for about three weeks and then there's a mangled postcard from RM wanting me to go to the post office to pay the import VAT, paying 60p parking and waiting in the rain for half an hour. No sign of any tracking to this day. They collude in their incompetence.

Contrast this to Fedex and DHL.

I can have something sent by Fedex from the U.S. using my account so that I control the method and the shipping costs. I get a tracking number by email the moment it's picked up and I can either look on the web or receive emails as it passes each transit point. If there's a delay for any reason, I get a notification immediately. I will get delivery to me two days after shipping - no messing about with post offices. An invoice for the shipping and import VAT arrives a few days later. If I'm sending something, I have the same facilities and I can also get a proof of delivery in the form of name and scanned signature downloadable from their web site as a PDF.

The theoretical cost is greater than USPS+RM but not by a great deal. The practical cost including all the chasing of these people to do what they say they will do is far greater than that difference.

[dmc]

Are you seriously considering that every item of post should be tracked and signed for??

There is no one at home here just about every weekday yet most days we have post of some sort. Do you suggest I have to go into town, pay parking and collect this? So instead of a daily service I get a less convenient, weekly service (or may I should drive to town everyday?)

I guess it's less of an issue if you have servants to send

Darren

[Andy Hall]

That was just to get your attention. The real point is that the minimum price needs to be nearer to a pound than 34p.

Royal Mail does if there is VAT to pay.

[Andy Dingley]

But you aren't customers, you're merely addressees (I've had this one out with them myself).

The person buying stamps is a customer. The person receiving it didn't pay for the service personally, thus doesn't matter to the Royal Mail. QED. You're lucky they bother to deliver it to you at all.

I agree with your first point, but not the second. I've got quite a soft spot for the Royal Mail and I dearly wish for them to succeed and to provide me with a competent service. However Consignia's management are, by definition (implicit in the re-naming), clueless fuckwits incapable of carrying on the trade of whelk-based refreshment.

[Frank Erskine]

Consignia as a trading name hasn't existed for about five years!

[Andy Hall]

Oh, sure. I figured that one out. The trouble is that wihout tracking, there is no way for their version of the customer or anybody else's for that matter, to determine whether or not they did what was paid for.

If I still wrote any cheques, the old line that the cheque's in the mail would be a very useful one.

I would too, if I didn't believe that it's already too late for them. The opportunities have been there and not taken on countless occasions.

I don't disagree with you there either.

Peston's blog on the BBC News site gives, I feel a reasonably balanced commentary about the situation:

most telling point is that both sides have been titting around for months, apparently wih each side being clueless about what the other wants to achieve. This was patently obvious weeks ago and so it becomes a face saving exercise in the end.

The main problem is that there is not enough money in what it does to support its staff and was why I made the point that the entry level should be £1. If something is worth sending at all, it's worth that. Imagine why the postmen want to continue to have an early start. For most it's because they need second jobs on the cash market just like firemen.

It's also one of the main reasons that I believe that it's a doomed operation at best likely to end up with more nimble competitors forever nipping at its heels.

Euthanasia would be the kindest option, rather like the Final Trip to the Vet for a much loved old pet. Frankly, keeping it alive is rather like keeping said old pet alive beyond what is in its best interests and I feel that this is only happening because of sentimentality for a "service" that doesn't really exist and hasn't long before it had any competition. Of course, nothing will be done. It will be left to fester in its own way becoming more and more untenable until it becomes a museum piece.

The NHS, of course, is exactly the same mix of incorrect expectation all round, incompetent management and no clear direction. That should be shut down as well, but when one has an organisation that is third in size to the Chinese army and the Indian railway in terms of people that it pays, then that will take a little longer.

Either way, I don't expect to see Royal Mail around in any form recognisable to us today within 10 years and the health service in a generation. Sooner or later people realise that while having soft spots may be a good thing, in the end reality has to set in.

[Derek Geldard]

Possibly,

But the fact is they did make the change, which was presumably meaningful and significant for them.

And now they are *still* in the clag.

DG

[Derek Geldard]

Let's be fair to them, it's not the RM, their regulator won't let them price themselves competitively in the market. So prices tend to go up about 1p at a time.

We have a Pitney Bowes postage meter. Every price change invoves us buying a new EPROM with the prices in a look-up table for 50 quid or so. We were Right Royally pigged off when the price was put up by 1p or so, then within just a few weeks another pricing scheme (Re: size / thickness of envelopes) of was announced.

DG

[Andy Hall]

It's a doomed operation, and the only question now left is how long will that take.....

I had to smirk when I read the following on the BBC News web site about the union membership ballot.

"Postal workers would vote on the deal's conditions by post"

[dennis]

You could chuck it and use a label printer to print your own postage and addresses. Then you won't need to buy another EPROM.

[Derek Geldard]

My sister runs a little jewellers shop, it's not Tiffany's or Mappin & Webb, but she does repairs.

She also has a degree in law.

What gets up her trumpet is the fact that it costs about £0.40 to send a repaired bracelet back to a customer, but if you want the RM to guarantee they/their employees won't pinch it, it costs about a fiver, which is within the same order of magnitude as the cost of a simple repair.

Any other organisation in the country (or so she says) would have to accept responsibility for goods entrusted to their care, but not the RM.

I'm not so sure she's right haulage contractors in general tend to have terms which limit their liability to according to the weight of your consignement in proportion to the weight and value of a trainload of shit. :-((

DG

[Andy Hall]

OK, so the regulator needs to be educated about market reality.

[Derek Geldard]

It was on a 5 year contract. Which had to include "Maintenance", (RM rules) a hangover from the days of mechanical postage meters, not that the "Maintenance" guy ever did anything even then. Now it's all electronic the user does all the maintenance such as changing the ink cartridge which IIRC were horribly expensive. But we still pay a quarterly bill for "Maintenance".

The contract runs out at the end of the month when we will revert to postage stamps which we will buy at COSTCO at a discount. :-))

BTW if you are referring to the RM "print your own stamps" scheme :

That is also a Pitney Bowes scheme.

*NO THANK YOU*

;-)

DG