Mail order chaos

[Dave Plowman (News]

I got my stamps along with my weekly Tesco delivery.

[Peter Johnson]

Can't account for four deliveries but when I ordered from RM a year ago the Christmas stamps came nicely packed and the ordinary definitives came in a flimsy plastic envelope, which led me to think that there are two steams, collectors and business. And of course their postage charges won't be the same as what we pay.

[Peter Johnson]

They said, a while ago, that they intended to recruit far more temps this year than usual but I don't know how that went. Up to yesterday my deliveris have been as normal, between 10.00 and 11.00.

[charles]

I've read that - to preserve social distancing - they've had to lay off sorting office staff.

[Andrew]

You mean subsidised by taxpayers surely ?. Govmint has no dosh of its own.

Andrew

[Andrew]

And don't bother with 1st class stamps. Everything goes at the same speed because they are allowed to ignore their commitment to 1st class mail during december.

[Andrew]

And China benefits massively from the international agreement regarding overseas mail. Royal Mail (and US Post) effectively do all the work, but don't get paid anything, which is why Trump threatened to pull out of the deal (or maybe he did pull out).

[alan_m]

They have been ignoring that since the first lock-down.

[nightjar]

That was the area where I was thinking there would be a problem. Social distancing is much less of a problem with street delivery staff, so they may well be recruiting more of those.

[Paul]

They don't even have their masks on in this shot ?

I used to work at the post office. This looks familiar. It's like old home week. The balding guy would be a letter carrier (postman) doing walk-sort.

This is more the scale I would expect. I don't see a lot of automation, which is good for the employee job security.

"We?ve effectively employed 450 people to support the operation just for Christmas in this and the neighbouring site alone"

Automation doesn't guarantee a thing, but it's a sign someone cares about productivity. The plant I was in, ran all three shifts, and there's no "slack" to crank up the plant. But it didn't matter, because they never cleaned the work floor area (concrete floor) so you didn't need a quiet shift so the janitor could get in there. I had to laugh - I found a recent article about my work location, where in the COVID era, the management said they were doing "deep cleaning" at the plant. And the employees were complaining that no cleaning had been done. Well, duh. How long have you worked there, and how much cleaning do you see out on the floor ? It's a pigsty in there. You expect to come home a bit dusty.

I don't even know where you'd start, to "deep clean" a site like that. Seeing as it had never been cleaned before, probably no one thought about it. You could start with a vacuum cleaner, to take a layer off the concrete.

Whereas, if you go into the management office space, the nice flooring in there was so clean, you could lick it without danger of infection. The contrast is striking.

I don't think the COVID virus would be all that happy in a plant that dirty. It would be crowded out by "Postal Germs". It would be interesting to send in a microbiologist and swab the area and see what lives there.

Paul

[nightjar]

...

They didn't need them in 2018 :-)

[Davey]

There is no update. It's still 'on it's way to me'.

Yawn.

[Davey]

This morning, there was a message waiting for me, saying that the item had moved to Chelmsford. At least it existed! Then it moved to my local PO, Delivery was estimated to be between

11:00 am and 3:00 today. It actually arrived, carried by our normal postie, Steve, at 10:40.