I took the redundancy offer 3 months ago and very glad i did.Just out of interest all you people slagging the posties off on here i have a few points to make.If the company you work for (when i say work you seem to spend more time on here than doing something useful )was told that although it costs you 13p to make an item and make a working profit how long would you keep going if you were told you can only charge 8p per item ?This is what has happened since the business was opened to one sided competition.
How easy it is for the likes of TNT and DHL to concentrate on business and bulk collection.I thought it was telling on tv last week .One of the bosses of the competition when asked about posties said we think they do a fantastic job.Well he would think that while his company are partly responsible for the downfall of RM by cherry picking the best bits they wouldn't touch the "last mile " with a barge pole.
As for the all posties are skivers and thieves that doesn't even warrant a reply.Apart from how much company time are you stealing when you spend most of your "working" day on here?Finally the reason i left after nearly 27 years?Mostly because of the half wits that are being put in charge.It's an easy but very physical job that is being ruined by incompetent ass wipes running it.I wish i could go into more detail but i haven't got hours to spare .Going riding now.

Interesting article about it here

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/maya01_.html

One thing you probably don’t know, for instance, is that the Royal Mail is already part-privatised. It goes under the euphemism of ‘deregulation’. Deregulation is the result of an EU directive that was meant to be implemented over an extended period to give mail companies time to adjust, but which this government embraced with almost obscene relish, deregulating the UK mail service long before any of its rivals in Europe. It means that any private mail company – or, indeed, any of the state-owned, subsidised European mail companies – is able to bid for Royal Mail contracts.

Take a look at your letters next time you pick them up from the doormat. Look at the right-hand corner, the place where the Queen’s head used to be. You’ll see a variety of different franks, representing a number of different mail companies. There’s TNT, UK Mail, Citypost and a number of others. What these companies do is to bid for the profitable bulk mail and city-to-city trade of large corporations, undercutting the Royal Mail, and then have the Royal Mail deliver it for them. TNT has the very lucrative BT contract, for instance. TNT picks up all BT’s mail from its main offices, sorts it into individual walks according to information supplied by the Royal Mail, scoots it to the mail centres in bulk, where it is then sorted again and handed over to us to deliver. Royal Mail does the work. TNT takes the profit.

None of these companies has a universal delivery obligation, unlike the Royal Mail. In fact they have no delivery obligation at all. They aren’t rival mail companies in a free market, as the propaganda would have you believe. None of them delivers any mail. All they do is ride on the back of the system created and developed by the Royal Mail, and extract profit from it. The process is called ‘downstream access’. Downstream access means that private mail companies have access to any point in the Royal Mail delivery network which will yield a profit, after which they will leave the poor old postman to carry the mail to your door.

So if ‘figures are down’ that doesn’t mean that volume is down. Volume, at least over that last few miles from the office to your door, is decidedly up. But even assuming that Mandelson was telling the truth, that volume really is down by 10 per cent, the fact is that staff levels are down even more, by 30 per cent. That still means each postman is doing a whole lot more work.

Royal Mail i've kept out of it until now. But……. now I felt we needed another Royal Mail thread on the front page because three isn't enough. 😉

I keep out of big paragraphs.

The whole thread title is a lie. He's not "kept out of it" at all, he openly admits he was in it until 3 months ago.

Posties – you can't trust them.

This echoes my thoughts from the other RM thread

http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/what-do-we-need-royal-mail-for

Bring back the RM monopoly for the common good ie the people of the UK not for the good of a bunch of multinationals.

Christ I'm becoming some kinda leftie

I think that the posties' determination to make our streets more colourful by dropping a red rubber band on to the pavement after every 10 deliveries is often undervalued.

I remember when first class used to be next day. Ah the good old days!

Why do people keep wanting their own Royal Mail threads? are the others not good enough, they all seem to descend to the same arguements. I cannot be bothered to even get through the OP on this one, can someone tell me if it's worth it/ or any different to the others in a one word answer, please.

Oldfart/Grumm – Nice to see a positive message for a change.
I'm sure in most jobs that are in the public eye there is always someone out there willing to slate you, but try to imagine how demoralising it feels when you go to work, do your absolute damndest to do a good days work and then read all the shit about yourself on here?

I think that the posties' determination to make our streets more colourful by dropping a red rubber band on to the pavement after every 10 deliveries is often undervalued.

You need to see the floor of our delivery office. Royal Mail in their infinite cost cutting wisdom have purchased some of the cheapest bands ever. For every 10 that I stretch over my bundles of mail I reckon about 40% of them snap. They have a usable life of less than a week.

)was told that although it costs you 13p to make an item and make a working profit how long would you keep going if you were told you can only charge 8p per item

I'd modernise, improve working practices to make them more efficient, probably try and automate some processes and lay off staff. It may not be nice but it's that or go under, which is where Royal Mail would be if they were a private company.

Don't get me wrong, they offer a good service, better than any courier I've dealt with but I'm an individual who buy stuff off the internet not the likes of Amazon who are pulling out on them because of the strikes but give them a hell of a lot of business.

I'd modernise, improve working practices to make them more efficient, probably try and automate some processes and lay off staff.

Interesting thought,what area's need modernising then and how do you do that ? When workers are working 9 hours for 8 hours pay how do you suppose laying delivery staff off is going to improve service/modernise ??

Amazon have taken some contracts away in the past.
The 'more efficient private company' they gave them to couldnt cope and simply sub-contracted back to RM.

You cant get rid of Royal Mail!

Who's going to steal my new sunglasses if you do!

Who's going to steal every last one of my birthday cards just in case there's money in one of them?

Who's going to turn up at 23.00 on November the 5th and keep our fire going for an extra 2 hours with sackloads of their undilivered mail?

Think of the kids!

Amazon have taken some contracts away in the past.

When it was announced that Amazon were going to stop using RM my very first thought was "well they never used Royal Mail for purely benevolent reasons". Presumably it was because the provided the cheapest and best service. So either Amazon will go back to RM or their customers will suffer or their profits will suffer.

The 'more efficient private company' they gave them to couldnt cope and simply sub-contracted back to RM.

Seen this type of thing before with FedEx. Somebody had clearly paid FedEx a 'courier' fee only for FedEx to forward the item through Royal Mails special delivery service, and no doubt FedEx made a few quid in the process.

BlingBling do you live in Kabul ?

No. Cardiff 😆

And you didn't get one single birthday card last birthday ?

some may be true some might not but ffs if you want to improve the corner that your fighting for get rid of the union guy who keeps coming on the radio. Sounds more like a worng type of bog roll everyone out that a modern thinker and will people stop harping on about the f'in second delivery never had one in my life was this something that happened in london (aka the whole world)