Wednesday 21 October 2009

Beware a world without the post

Since the Royal Mail seems intent on ritual disembowelling before our very eyes, I suppose we are going to have to expect to deal a lot more with the private courier companies.

I had a delivery from one called City Link this morning. I was taking the children to school, and when I got back there was a card with various options, none of them ticked. There was a phone number which took me through to a comouterised system which would only tell me that I had to contact the sender to get permission for another delivery (I didn't know, of course, who that was). There was no human option.

After I pressed 0 and # in no particular order 40 or so times, I got a message giving me a customer service number. They told me they could, after all, try and deliver again, but said they would only say they would come some time the following day. The children will still have to go to school, so it seems unlikely that I'm going to get my parcel - and why should I go all the way to Beckenham to pick it up?

Welcome to the world without Royal Mail.

2 comments:

David Cox said...

Isn't one 'stakeholder' voice missing - the British public. The CWU and RM management are getting all macho with each other - yet it is the public that looses.
We really need to have some kind of democratic control of the PO, it should be turned into a BBC type organisation with a Royal Charter, and local boards. I don’t know anybody who wants the Post Office/Royal Mail to be anything but a public service. The public and small businesses will suffer if the Royal Mail is broken. Has nobody thought of the massive potential of an organisation that calls at every address six days a week and has a retail presence in every town and large village in the UK.

David Boyle said...

I absolutely agree. The post office needs to be reinvented as a mutual, preferably owned by its customers, or - as you so rightly put it - with a Royal Charter like the BBC. It underpins local enterprise and local business.