Obv I don’t want to get too deep into privatisation weeds as we don’t want to get into the dreaded (whispers) politics in this comm. But I’m interested to know if other people are noticing the postal service deteriorating.
Mail for other houses (my door number is clearly marked)… delivery timelines missed… then the icing on the cake, had a delivery that was supposed to come up to Newcastle delivered while I’m not at home, they left it in a ‘safe place’ despite one not being designated.
Want to hear what the ‘safe place’ was? Out on the street, jammed behind a random neighbours wheelie bin! So yeah that’s £110 of new clothes gone to some lucky local who swiped it. Boooo, Royal Mail, booooo!
To counteract the whinge, I just made a banging pizza almost from scratch. Success!
Definitely:
I honestly think it’s time for a radical rethink. Daytime deliveries for businesses, evening deliveries for homes. Postman to be paid for performance.
BTW I just noticed your username… that’s the punchline to my favourite awful joke ('What do you call a Frenchman in sandals?"), don’t think I’ve ever seen it in the wild before!
Who is going to pay for evening deliveries for households?
“Performance goals” sound good on paper but don’t work and would introduce extra cost. Delivery time would require all post to be tracked, which would take extra time (=cost) at delivery. To track successful deliveries, you’d need a complaints procedure that’s simple enough to be widely used, and staffed well enough to check up on a subset of complaints so to not lead to unfair punishment.
Instead of all this extra complexity that would make posties lives worse, we could just do what we did before - pay them reasonably well and hire enough of them so they can do their job properly. 🤷🏼♂️
undefined> Postman to be paid for performance. Postman to be paid for performance. I don’t think that works.
If it did, flyers and phonebooks (back when they were a thing) wouldn’t be found dumped in hedges in bulk. Post is a little different, but not that much. and there have been many cases where bags and bags of undelivered mail have been found stashed in postmen’s homes because they couldn’t be arsed to deliver them.
I think thats a reason to pay them for performance. Not just how quickly they deliver but how they perform accurately.
The problem is - except for tracked parcels, nothing is traced and there’s so many ways for something to go missing between sender and recipient. Hard to measure performance if you can’t rely on that.
As I wrote. I’m talking a radical rethink. Not using existing work practices and systems. There’s absolutely no reason that each item can’t be tracked through Royal Mail. In fact it’s quite surprising that they don’t already.
Because postboxes mean no origination, or at least, none that can get back to the poster.
But they could track them from the postbox to measure how the service is performing in general, and how each stage performs including the final sort and delivery.
This is not tracking as in people seeing where their letter/packet/parcel is but as I mentioned in an earlier post, tracking to see how the service performs.