Two online purchases, both made on Dec. 2.
And so it goes...
Well we use Articles for the blind free first class subsidised by the government. Out of 76 pouches with ram sticks sent to us, in three weeks 22 have still not materialised. Royal mail admitted to one of my volunteers at the local delivery office that they have trucks of mail parked up all over the country as they are concentrating on mail with tracking data from the likes of Amazon etc, which I guess is their priority, but its rapidly turning into a shambles so I would suggest we all move Christmas to February just to be sure everyone gets their mail.
Post offices are fed up as they are not Royal Mail any more but still get the sharp end of peoples tongues for the mis deliveries and delays. For the record. Post Office Counters, as they are now known are a wholly separate business to Royal mail who handle the sorting and delivery of the mail. And they are putting letter first class up to another 9 pence,which I feel is a scandal when you realise its now often cheaper to get stuff sent door to door by a courier than to put it into a post box and just hope for the best. It is my view that the mail centre idea, while looking good on paper, where all sorting is done for a very wide area await one big centre, has failed due to the lack of local knowledge, constant moving of parcels and letters on trucks and effectively losing track of half of it for weeks. Time was they would deploy extra temp staff to cope with demand, and manage to keep the backlog down. This does not seem to happen these days. Anyone who has visited a mail centre may also know that those employed there are normally people who find it hard to get a job as they do not pay that well, and hence they end up with a transient workforce, many of whom have poor English skills and have no real commitment to doing the job properly.The big automated systems get mail jammed in them and often they are so stretched, it is seldom shut down for somebody to retrieve the stuck mail. We notice that our plastic pouches have a short life span of maybe a couple of months before tears and other damage to the Velcro sealing areas and address pouches means we have to retire them. None of this used to be the case even 10 years ago.
Brian
Interestingly, the growth of business for courier companies and the way they organise means that their best drivers are developing "the knowledge" and since they are increasingly required to leave parcels with photo evidence of delivery, they can be better than "postmen". Someone posted a photo with "Where is this?" on local Facebook the other day and in minutes one of the delivery drivers was able to explain not only where it was, but how the parcel would be in specific a location just "out of sight" from the public highway.
We've had no problems with any of them, apart from very occasionally missing delivery slots. And even then, at least one of the companies gave a warning and included a link to the tracker on the van.
Royal Mail is suffering delays because of all the people ordering online for Christmas :-)
In my experience just add 2 days to Royal Mail's claimed delivery times (and they probably exclude weekends as working days for delivery time scale purposes).
Apparently there are at least three factors:
1) Overload due to massive increase in mail order 2) Staff off sick or isolating 3) Social distancing in sorting/delivery officesI notice they are now delivering as late as 5 p.m. round here - alternate days.
Maybe rather than Amazon, it should be Royal Mail who deliver by drone. What could possibly go wrong? :-)
Brian
Let's see: 4 Dec. + 48 hrs. = 6 Dec. That was never offered, but 9 Dec. was. It's now 12 Dec., and I'm still waiting.
2 days is way out of that range!In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, Bob Eager snipped-for-privacy@eager.cx writes
As early as that.
Wednesday evening, about 7:15PM, the letter box rattled and two items of mail dropped onto the floor. One of them had no time/date of posting on it, but the other (second class) was marked with Tuesday's date, so next day deliver.
Adrian
Yeah, so unexpected.
On the other hand in recent weeks we've bought a couple of items from Amazon.co.uk. In both cases the quoted standard delivery time was about a week, and Amazon are making it harder and harder to avoid signing up to "Prime" which promises much faster delivery - the option to get non-prime standard, and generally free, delivery is now presented in an inconspicuous place using a small font. But we managed it. And both items actually arrived in a couple of days, much faster than claimed. It's obvious that their week-long delivery time estimates are mainly there to tempt the ignorant to sign up to Prime.
Second odd example: my wife decided she'd like some Christmas stamps. Our nearest Post Office isn't all that near, sometimes has long queues, and might not have the pictorial stamps anyway. So she tried on-line. The Post Office charges £10 for smaller orders, which seems extortionate for items which will generally fit in a small standard envelope. But if you spend over £50 postage is free. So that's what she did, getting a variety of values to cover cards that we'll send abroad, and with postage going up twice a year at rates well over inflation, even getting more than you need imminently seems a good investment. So she ordered a set of stamps costing a bit over £50. These stamps came in *four* separate deliveries, spread over a week. No wonder they feel the need to charge £10. And what a ridiculously inefficient system it is.
Had one the other day minutes before 18:00.
RM have said they are having problems. Seems there are too many parcels...
What hacks me off is that so many items are obviously tracked but the recipient-to-be cannot use that tracking information until the item has been delivered. I often see more detailed information regarding tiny packets of very little value sent from China than significant cost items sent within the UK. (Not always - they sometimes arrive without the tracking showing anything.)
It is hard to believe that there would be a significant increase in costs simply from allowing us to see the information!
Royal Mail seem to spend a lot of time moving parcels from hub to hub. I ordered some football kit for the grandson and was notified when it was sent by the supplier. It went to the local depot and seemed to spend over 24 hours there before moving to a hub near the collecting depot to spend 24 hours there. It the moved to a hub near me spending over 24 hours there before moving to my local depot with another 24 hour sojourn and finally delivered to me the following day, inefficient does not do it justice. In fact I got an email from the supplier asking me was I pleased with my purchase before it arrived.
Richard
Christmas always seems to be different with Amazon in that they will send out as quickly as possible irrespective of Prime.
What I've found during other times is that they may quote a 7 day delivery if you don't select Prime but what they actually do is not process the order for 6 days, then send you it has been posted email and it arrives on the 7th day (taking 1 day to deliver).
So did I. Perhaps I got the 'collectors' page.
I ordered a half sheet and paid £1.95 (!) postage.
They took ten days to arrive, but came in a plastic folder with a nice letter too.
snip
Mine is slightly different. It finally moved from its original hub, to my 'local' hub, and is now sitting there. For days. The tracking detail is farcical: It was received by RM on Dec. 4, then moved to my local hub. That's it.
That usually means that it has been stolen or they will claim that an attempted delivery was made and you got the "sorry you were out" card.
Yes as I said, the way they are doing it, or were was to fast track those which were trackable, but now it seems that whole trucjk parks of vehicles are there just waiting for somebody to get the stuff out of them at the mail centres. As I say, in normal circumstances this hub to hub makes sense as its not going huge distances, but really what needs to be done when they are really busy is to use local offices with extra staff to sort mail into local and elsewhere outside of the area. That should reduce the loads at the big mail centres with trucks full of mail which for all anyone knows may need onward transmission to yet another centre as the local office can only send the unsorted mail to the next nearest hub. Brian
You can purchase postage stamps from office suppliers (Viking) but I guess there will be no saving unless the delivery charge is spread across other stuff.
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I suspect that Covid-19 precautions make it difficult from them to recruit the numbers of extra people they usually employ at this time of year.
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