Pretty much without fail, all greetings cards arriving through my door are slightly ripped, slit along one side or lifted along the glued seal. Funnily enough all other mail (council circulars, bank correspondence etc..) is received in good order. I’ve jumped to the conclusion that it’s down to the nefarious activities of miscreants in the postal system.

A friend at the other end of the country reckons there’s systemic pilfering there too.

I don’t send cash in cards (in fact I barely remember to send cards) and most of my relatives don’t either. I’m not counting the losses from these envelopes; they’re negligible (although my kids might be a few quid short at birthdays). I just think it’s p155 poor that post is seemingly being tampered with consistently.

I realise it must be difficult to catch bad posties given the numerous hands a piece of mail must pass through but has anyone tried following this type of thing up?

Kettle is on.

Six pages, one ban and a floubce somewhere around page four.

Sometimes some letters/cards get damaged simply due to weather and/or friction from the rubber bands used to tie up bundles of mail, posties are in a position of trust and IMO a vast majority are trustworthy.

But there are bad eggs out there, if you really feel your mail is being opened then report it and let Royal Mail investigate. I randomly started googling people I went to school with and was shocked to find someone I knew became a postie and got caught for mail theft ~15 years ago. https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/prison-postie-who-stole-800-2919418

I’m getting my flounce in now – in case I forget to do it later….👍😉

Floubcing all over here. 😉
RM.

Floubcing is what the kids are calling it these days!

😀

OK I concede, FULL of tea leaves may be a bit strong. No way rubber bands are responsible though. There’s a ne’er-do-well in our midst.

I managed to avoid floubcing on the toilet floor earlier. Should have put that in the “Small Wins” thread.

My postie is ace; he even brings dog treats for the dog (smart move I reckon) I’m sure some aren’t so ace. Humans 🙄

I realise it must be difficult to catch bad posties given the numerous hands a piece of mail must pass through but has anyone tried following this type of thing up?

Its much easier for them to catch a bad postie of you actually tell the post office.

While there are lot of people in the chain between the sender and the receiver its not the case that all cards everywhere are getting tampered with. If most of your post is then it suggests the problem is nearer to you than any of the people sending stuff to you.

They have procedures like putting test letters into the chain at different points to see what happens to them.

So if you think theres a real issue tell the Royal Mail rather than just the internet.

I do think there is a problem. Perhaps the way forward is to keep a photo record of mail received in poor order.

From current feedback it sounds like it might be localised.

You may also want to watch one of the modern sorting machines at work. They don’t play nice with some post and will munch things without a second thought if having a slightly bad day.

I believe the best approach is to send a carbon offset voucher via a small cloud generated from ones own sense of smug superiority.

I believe RM (Royal Mail not Rogermoore) use loads of temporary contractors at this time of year. For, eh, some reason.

You may also want to watch one of the modern sorting machines at work. They don’t play nice with some post and will munch things without a second thought if having a slightly bad day.

I worked in a mail room when I was a student. Bulk mail from banks, etc. is all of consistent sizes and has clearly printed addresses so it runs through scanners etc. very cleanly. Things like greeting cards are all different sizes and are an absolute curse to process. When you are earning minimum wage and processing untold thousands of pieces of mail, you don’t give a shit about whether it gets ripped or mangled. I always made sure I picked up each bag of mail and threw it across the room just in case there might be a letter bomb in there before I actually opened the bag and started processing it.

Having been a Postie I can still there’s very little chance of you getting the opportunity to open an envelope up. You’re more bothered about getting everything sorted, bundled up and out on to your round as quick as possible.
As mentioned above it’s more than likely the sorting machines that are to blame. Standard letters (bills etc as mentioned) are a nice uniform shape, however cards aren’t and often have things stuck to the front of them that protrude thus get caught up in the sorting machine and torn.
I had endless cards that arrived to me to sort like this, what should happen is that the Postie should put them in a little bag (ok this may have changed since I was a Postie) with details on it about it being damaged …. fine if you have one or two to do but this time of year you may have multiple per round so some may not bother to do it… And again as mentioned above some may just get torn when they’re bundled up or shoved into the Posties bag.
All posties I worked with were honest and valued their jobs too much, any sort of stealing and word would soon get around and certainly would be self ‘policed’

It’ll be like any other job. Majority of staff will be decent, a few will be super hard working, a handful of slackers and unfortunately a couple of blighters who will take anything they can.

Our posty was on the rob probably 4 or 5 years ago, rather than ask on here i phoned royal mail, they took it very seriously and informed me they would dispatch a few internal “honeypot” type parcels/letters. We had a new posty about 3 weeks later. If he was caught I’ll never know but his replacement made me think that that was the case.

Just gonna leave this here because it’s Friday

If he was caught I’ll never know

In the Royal Mail  – you don’t get caught. You get ‘dispatched’. Frank the Machine does it. Nasty business.

Last year, the xmas temps they use in Cambrigde folded the letters in two before shoving it through the letter box, making a mess of all the xmas cards….

It’s nothing new. Back in the 70s my Dad’s climbing buddy who was an architect got the job to design a new sorting office for Stevenage. Part of the brief was a gallery above the sorting floor from where management could watch the sorters as pilferage was a major, acknowledged problem.

http://viz.co.uk/2014/10/15/postman-plod/014/10/15/postman-plod/

Two friends of mine are posties, very nice chaps and most certainly not on the rob. Today happens to be my daughters 11th birthday, looking at the envelopes they are obviously greetings cards, not one of them appears to have been tampered with. We live in a fairly quiet village.
When we lived in a city, my other daughters birthday card from my parents didn’t arrive – that had cash in it.
As above, there will be some very decent guys and also some rotten eggs. Current posties are very friendly. Wonder if there are any stats about countryside and city mail loss? Could be the sheer volume of mail is different?

pilferage was a major, acknowledged problem.

… and addressed, back in the 70s, by the sounds of things?

Place I used to work in I had a variety of different jobs, one involved helping sort the incoming mail, which could be up to 170 tubs of mail, with up to 100-150 items in each tub. As the clients were all charities, the mail was all returned ticket stubs with payments, mostly cheques or credit cards, but some were cash. We were on camera all the time, and a temp was caught pilfering, and we did hear that at least one postie was caught, he was putting envelopes he suspected of having money in to one side to open later.
Report to RM, they take pilfering very seriously indeed!

Back before CRC became wiggle there was a spell where almost everything I ordered from them got lost in the post. I was irritated having to phone up and complain regularly and fairly often the parts were then out of stock. I mentioned this to a friend who lives locally and it turned out he was having the same issue. We raised this issue with CRC which turned out to be a great result as we were given priority post for a while free of charge. A while later a local postie was arrested for theft, I always wondered how they caught him. I see his address on that article, must call and get my parts off him.

Around that time the CRC parcels were also changed to no longer have their logo on them.

Former Postie Who Stole From Royal Mail & Was Originally Jailed For Six Months Has Sentence Suspended Upon Appeal

Why are we still sending money in cards? It’s just too high risk. Not just because it can get stolen but because it can get lost especially at this time of year with high volume and temp staff.

There’s a sponsored mountain biker that lives near me and anyone who is into biking would recognise his name. He gets sent a lot of mtb gear through the post but a lot of it went missing. In the end he got so fed up that he changed his address to the LBS And  stuff started arriving again.

He also reported it to the post office and after a few weeks got a new postman.

If this is genuine…

Pretty much without fail, all greetings cards arriving through my door are slightly ripped, slit along one side or lifted along the glued seal.

Why on earth would you not have reported it already?

And don’t take this the wrong way, but is there any chance it might be a bit of you seeing what you want to see?

If it’s real and an ongoing, long term thing then others would be affected – and there’s no way everyone in the area would let it go or just moan on the internet.

was there not a certain postie that was* on here that swapped price tags on a pair shirts in a shop once to get them cheaper. 🤔

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*may still be