AndyBlog: Mail Men Pause

Mail Men Pause

Royal-Mail

Well, I'm glad they think it is, because I am taking their treatment of me increasingly personally. Repeated slow delivery times for packages and parcels is their speciality, but now the lax attitude is starting to extend to the standard letter delivery as well.

I know this is hopelessly parochial, but the poor performance of the Royal Mail affects quality of life and certainly compromises my business. Letters I send seem to get out, but things people send to me take forever to get through.

I am still waiting for a package to arrive after 2 weeks in the system. Several have been delivered after 10 days or more, and always delivered on a Sunday. Lee, our local depot manager, tells me he is short staffed because of sickness. If that is the case, he has a lot of people sick, and for a long time. Everyone I meet from his office seems offhand and completely unmotivated. What a sorry state of affairs.

Naturally, I complained to the Royal Mail, but I have received no response of any kind. Just to make sure, I complained to the watchdog for the mail service, Postwatch. They told me that because complaints to the Royal Mail were in such bountiful supply, I would need to wait a long time, because they used the same system that I do to complain to them.

The whole thing is ludicrous, and I mention it only because it seems indicative of a wider attitude across the UK. The idea seems to go something like this:

1) Make a company national and very big.
2) Allow it to provide a very poor service.
3) Have a tiny complaints department.
4) Simply ignore the complaints and pocket the money.

Small companies can no longer get away with this, but the big ones do. The general public have little or no comeback. I expect, if I am to get any sort of result on this, I will need to really dig in - and even then I may not get far.

Late parcels, not a big deal, you might think, but the wider implications make me feel isolated and powerless. And this, I suspect, is exactly what the Royal Mail and so many other massive companies are hoping for. It makes their greed an awful lot easier to sustain.

I run a company, just a little one. If I were to treat my customers in this way, the results would be disastrous.