OT: Delivery service too good!

Don't believe a word they say! I often get an "automated" email from RM saying something will be delivered between 10am and 3pm. Sometimes a second email will be received saying that it will now be delivered by

These emails are sent only when the sender has paid extra for tracking.

I don't believe that my area has had a daily delivery for the past year or more. Non-tracked mail arrives in batches irrespective of being 1st or 2nd class and when they were posted. I live in a highly populated urban area.

With RM, once it gets to the stage of "out for delivery from local office" it's accurate (at least around here)

Although the e-mail message came from Royal Mail, closer examination revealed that it is actually being delivered by Parcel Force. I hope.

as far as I know, Parcel Force is a division of Royal Mail

I never know what is what in the Royal Mail/Post Office/Parcel Force universe. One moment you are told off for using the name for one when it should have been something else, then you get this scenario where one seems to substitute for the other. I go back to the days when 'phones came, on rental, from the GPO. Much simpler. Quicker deliveries, too.

"Phones came, on rental, from the GPO"

You forgot to mention 'After an 18 month waiting list' (If you were lucky).

Our postal service is very good, but my mother in law's in east Oxford is spectacularly bad. At best, she gets one delivery every week (often one every fortnight) and outgoing mail from a postbox in that area seems to be delayed by a similar amount. It means that we and she both need to post birthday cards a fortnight early to guarantee that they will arrive by the desired date. They may arrive the day after posting, but then again they may sit in the sorting office for nearly a fortnight before delivery to her or before "injection" into the general Royal Mail system. I'm not sure what the postmark date is for outgoing mail from her - whether it is the date it was put in an Oxford pillar box or the date it was forwarded to our sorting office for delivery to us.

I'm surprised that Royal Mail hasn't been hauled over the coals for it, with MPs asking searching questions of the CEO, because something is very badly wrong with her sorting office. I'm not sure how widespread the problem is - whether it's the whole of Oxford or just her suburb.

It's usually short-staffing, which means the sorting office doesn't have enough people to get the mail out compared with the mail volume. At that point they prioritise tracked mail and regular 1st/2nd class mail gets left behind. Eventually they manage to clear the backlog and deliver it, but there's no bound on how long it takes.

Staff turnover at some delivery offices is very high (the working conditions aren't great), and if they don't have people they can't deliver mail. It's possible it affects some rounds more than others if some have a regular postie and others depend on short term cover.

Since privatisation they will no doubt say they have to compete with Evri, Yodel et al but are lumbered with higher costs, so there's no money to improve staff retention.

Theo

Where I live the RM service is bad, where friends live (200 miles away from my home) the RM service is bad.

I'm aware that in both locations they are seriously short of staff and, more importantly, they cannot keep new staff. Where my friends live it appears that a significant number of older members of staff are due to retire soon.

We have had an erratic service, although it's better now. The word from actual amployess is that it's down to short staffages.

And possibly a shared (party) line.

It was another monopoly industry that acted as though it was doing you a favour in supplying what you had paid for.

I remember that my parents had a party line when we first had a 'phone. But when I bought my own flat in 1976, I don't remember any specific delay in getting a line connected. Your experience etc etc....

When I first moved to the US and rented a flat there (an 'apartment'), I went along to the local AT&T office one lunchtime, ordered a connection, walked away with a handset and a huge directory, and when I got back to the flat after work that afternoon, I had a dial tone. This was in 1977.

To this day, my uncle and aunt have a Stretford exchange number, despite being in Urmston, as back in the '70s they were offered that in 12 months, rather than waiting 18 months for the correct exchange.

Not a party line, but back in BT only days, I ended up with a DACS(?) unit in my hall, with a filter at the top of the pole, allowing my house and a neighbouring house, to share the same line, without either noticing (frequency change at my box and the exchange end for my line). It took me some years to get that removed and a new line, as when modems changed to 56K, I could not get above 22K through that system.

When I bought the house, gas, electric and water all accepted a phone call to change the billing, change the electricity meter to a standard one (removing the pre-pay meter) and fitting a new gas meter (old one had been removed and capped off). BT were the only utility that insisted that I took a day off work, came to their city-centre office and queued for a couple of hours, to show them paperwork proving change of ownership.

I think it was less than one month for me for a new line at my new-build flat; that was just before liberalisation (1981).

nib

It actually arrived at 2:10, well within the window given me in the morning. In a large white van, the first time I have known one of those used by Parcel Force. Our local postman has been using one since last year, he said the old red one failed its MOT, and RM/GPO/whatever had bought a job lot of white vans, which would eventually be painted red. He is still waiting.

My recollection is that they moved the sorting to Swindon because the unions were too militant in Oxford.

The city council here used to have yellow vans, now they have white vans because they fetch a higher price when it comes to disposing of them.

That was not an isolated case but some of the relocation may have been due to centralising hubs. The local sorting office (a very large custom built warehouse type building with its own platform on a main line railway line) was moved 25 miles to a more central location in Essex. At the time this caused a lot of friction between the unions and management and increased the unreliability of RM delivery.

Ive had "24" tracked packages stuck in this centralised hub for 10 days or more. Phoning the RM only (national) number to find out what's happen reveals that the first line customer support only has the same information as I could find myself on-line - complete waste of time phoning.

Our postie now drives a white van, with no Royal Mail identification on it.