Time Royal Mail just gave up, and closed?

This morning, they delivered a post card invite, to a couple of meetings with the railway planners, about the ongoing upgrade work. Fine you might think, no problem there - except the meetings actually took place 3 days ago, which suggests RM simply sat on them for at least 7 whole days. I wonder if anyone turned up at the meeting?

In my youth, the postie would deliver twice per day, the items had usually been posted the day before, and the second post was the cheaper stamped 2nd class items. The post could be next day, throughout most of the country, especially in larger towns, but now, it's just an unreliable shambles, with no guarantee of delivery at all, certainly no delivery by any useful date. IT WAS RELIABLE!

We have doctors, and hospital appointments being posted, and being delivered the week after the appointment date/time. It's so bad, that many have stopped using RM for such time critical post. The more who stop using it, the more expensive it becomes to run RM, and the less profitable generally.

Maybe, depending on ones opinion, Royal Mail should never have been privatised. A bit like our water, energy, rail, steel industries. There is of course all the other stuff we know about i.e. ever declining quantity of stuff being posted, more challenging for them to make £££ etc.

Any postal service which does NOT deliver to the whole country, should pay a levy to the RM, wo do, IMO.

I've just looked again at the card, and it is marked as First Class postage, and so even worse than I at first thought. I have numerous times filled the form in and told RM, we do not want the junk mail, but it makes no difference at all. The one thing we can be guaranteed to get, is the junk.

Harry Bloomfield said:

which suggests RM simply sat on them for at least 7 whole days. I wonder if anyone turned up at the meeting?

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Maybe the planners posted them the day before the meeting, hoping no one would turn up and raise any questions/objections. ?

Justin Passing said:

Any postal service which does NOT deliver to the whole country, should pay a levy to the RM, wo do, IMO.

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Any postal service which does NOT deliver to the whole country for a flat rate, should pay a levy to the RM

Harry Bloomfield said:

This morning, they delivered a post card invite, to a couple of meetings with the railway planners, about the ongoing upgrade work. Fine you might think, no problem there - except the meetings actually took place 3 days ago, which suggests RM simply sat on them for at least 7 whole days. I wonder if anyone turned up at the meeting?

In my youth, the postie would deliver twice per day, the items had usually been posted the day before, and the second post was the cheaper stamped 2nd class items. The post could be next day, throughout most of the country, especially in larger towns, but now, it's just an unreliable shambles, with no guarantee of delivery at all, certainly no delivery by any useful date. IT WAS RELIABLE!

We have doctors, and hospital appointments being posted, and being delivered the week after the appointment date/time. It's so bad, that many have stopped using RM for such time critical post. The more who stop using it, the more expensive it becomes to run RM, and the less profitable generally.

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putting to one side the evils off privatisation
the royal mail has a public duty as in same priced delivery to anywhere in the uk at predetermined intervals under legislation
now the enforcement so far has been minimal as the dogma off selling off has meant to make the po worth buying light hands have been applied
but in reallity any public duty requirements mean you must have public money input but over several years the choice has been to fudge and relax from twice a day to once a day to every other day to now where parcels and hospital/nhs letters should be urgent but only when manning and circumstances permit have been allowed to try and get it to work without public money which we have seen will always fail as public requirements are the equivalent to a ball and chain and an arm removed making it impossible in the modern world where public service and shareholders fight for attention

Denmark has got rid of its postal service. There's no reason why it should be needed any more.

I can send a 2kg parcel to the other end of the country with InPost for about £2.50. With full tracking and a delivery photo. Royal Mail charge very little less for a birthday card. Most people using them are only doing so because they haven't bothered finding out about alternatives, they're paying mug prices for a victorian service.

The NHS sends millions of letters, it's insane. They could use texts, or have an auto-dialer robot who phones the oldies who don't do that tech stuff.

Hello, this is the NHS with your appointment details, please get a pen and paper, I'll wait until you come back... Your appointment is at bla time at bla place. Press 1 to repeat. Thank you bye... £1 saved.

The same could be applied to almost all letters.

I suspect that the Czech billionaire has bought the company to shut it and asset-strip it anyway, they're trying to fail. They own acres of prime development land under all their sorting offices in every town and city in the country, he'd make a profit by shutting the whole lot down and flogging the land. I suspect this is the plan, but they'll take a few years deliberately being useless to justify this.

Ivor Windybottom said:

Most people using them are only doing so because they haven't bothered finding out about alternatives, they're paying mug prices for a victorian service.....

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The Victorian speed and level of service, would be great

Ivor Windybottom said:

The NHS sends millions of letters, it's insane. They could use texts, or have an auto-dialer robot who phones the oldies who don't do that tech stuff.

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If only! Here, from the NHS, they seem to use a mix of methods - plain sms, Whatapp, then sms, combined with inviting me to login to the NHS app, and a multitude of annoying menus to get through, just to find it is a reminder of my appointment, then actual paper letters. That means I need to go through numerous means of communication, to just recheck the details.

My GP, wants me to add to the mix of SYSMONLINE with PATCHS and yet another app I had long since given up on. I tried PATCHS, found it made no sense at all - it required me to log into it regularly, to spot messages from my GP, rather than it letting me know there was a message - I had to ask my GP to remove me from it.