General Chat

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11258649

Not sure if this is good or bad about the current postal service.

In 2002 I moved house.

In 2007 I moved house again, to an address in the same street I lived in prior to my move in 2002.

Six months ago I received a letter at my current address ( from Government department) posted to my address 3 months prior to my move in 2002. Good on the Postie :)). Does that make sense??.

The short answer is " I don't know" .

NO it should not be sold, unfortuantly lack of funding and investment have caused the downfall of the Royal Mail, there should be more investment and training of staff to bring it back the service it once was, and it should remain a public service.

we have a lot of problems with our post, never arrives before 3pm, everyother day, get post for neighbours so we then have to go round the street delivering each other mail. They use a lot of temps as they have a recruitment freeze as do all pubic services which means a lot of untrained staff who dont really care if they get it right or not as they only temps.

No!

Absolutely not

The essentials of life should stay in public ownership. That extends to gas, electricity and public transport in my view

I've nothing against private enterprise, but the staple commodities of life should be owned by the people, for the people.

Sue x

Of course it should not be sold.

NO!

In a former life, before redundancy struck I used to work in customer service for Segas (British Gas).
I can’t count the number of times I turned up at a customers house to be greeted by a hostile customer ranting about the Gas Board, usually along the lines of, “you wouldn’t get away with this type of service if you were a private company!”.

When the nationalised company was sold off to private industry. Guess what? “You’re just interested in profits not customers it was never like this before you were privatised!”

Sometimes you just can't win!

In my view they should never have sold off the profitable telephone arm of the Post Office, why not have all that profit that BT make going straight back into the national coffers?

Ok rant over back to normal now!
Best wishes,
Mayfield.

When we have the same postie for a while he performs a useful service, taking mail for those who cant walk to the postbox, and generally checing if neighbours are ok if he cant rouse them. Some days , bcause of problems at depot, post is late, he cant change that. Then he is moved to another round and we get the ones who cant read and dont care. I worked for the royal mail as relief postie, on a bike, with a 14 mile round in the country, back in the 50s. For or five weeks in a year. Set out at eight and had to be finished by twelv. I thought it was a good job and good money, and went rain, shine or snow. Still think it should be kept as National.

My Oh had to have criminal records checked when he joined RM, also me, his parents as well.
Uniform was so smart and woe betide if you had the wrong coloured shoes. Now anyone can be employed, it seems. he took early voluntary redundancy after 32 years of working his way up from Postman to Senior Management. What a loss of experience.

I don't believe it should be sold. It was very interesting reading some of the replies to the article I posted the link for.

Personally I think the present government is dismantling a lot of our services under the guise of efficiencies when it is not really efficient to do so and the money could be raised elsewhere.

I don't think the Royal Mail should be sold off because it will be the same as the transport system and bin collection. Private enterprise does not want to encompass the outlying areas as this reduces the profit margin. Outlying areas don't have the transport link as in days before the change over and the same will happen with the post. Whilst it won't affect me I can see that some will have their services reduced to once a week or ' a come and fetch it yourself service'. Who would have thought twenty years ago that we would be trundling our own bins to the road side. In our area we only have a fortnightly service to collect rubbish. My bin was left so far away from my home once that I reported it stolen,( thats not a joke)...... well I suppose it is really.-JLe

A lot of Canada Post, except for basic mail delivering, was "privatised" some time ago. Package delivery, for instance. What it means is nobody ever gets a package delivered, ever. We get notices that they tried to deliver a package but no one was home. Even when, like in the case of No.1's 80+ yr old parents, they're never anywhere but home, at the top of a condo tower with a convenient intercom from the lobby, and they were waiting for the delivery. So his mum got to take a taxi to a post office station and wait in line for half an hour to get the parcel.

Privatising never, ever, ever makes anything better.


Could I just suggest that one refrain from saying things like

"Don't let the frogs have it - they seem to grab ev erything else."

It's unwise to have one's public services owned by foreign interests. That's no reason to use bigoted language.

The French don't own anything. Enormous transnational corporations based in various countries own a lot of things. Blame the ones running the global economy all you like, but refrain from this trash, if you wouldn't mind.

Now, I do chuckle at you folks and having to trundle your own garbage to the curb. About the earliest I remember garbage collection here is the late 50s, and if anyone ever got their garbage picked up at the door (or wherever you used to get yours picked up from) here, it would have been a long time before that. ;)

I can't think of a worse way of spending public money than having public employees making separate trips off the road for each household's garbage!

Oh, and Saturday mail delivery -- I think we must have had that once here, but it's a dim memory now if so. Isn't Saturday mail delivery a bit unnecessary?

On the fetch-it-yourself mail: that's how it's done here now for all new housing developments. My sister's was built about 10 years ago, and there's a super-box at the end of her block, maybe 10 houses away, where she goes to get her mail.

Those things also replaced the village post offices here where people did go to pick up their mail in the past, and used the post office as the informal centre of the community. They have big green boxes now too, because the little post offices were too expensive.

And our local postal stations in cities were replaced by counters in businesses -- the 7-11 near us (a US chain) is where we have to deal with registered mail and such. Minimum-wage, barely trained convenience store workers, handling your mail. There were protests back when it happened 15 years ago or so, but, well ...

The thing is, just because others put up with an inferior service doesn't mean that we all have to.

"On the fetch-it-yourself mail: that's how it's done here now for all new housing developments. My sister's was built about 10 years ago, and there's a super-box at the end of her block, maybe 10 houses away, where she goes to get her mail."

What's the next step? Deliver your own mail? lol

The French are quite keen on keeping up their standards, they're not very impressed with us Brits increasing our retirement age. I couldn't find the exact article I read on this but this is an article on the French striking to keep their retirement age the same:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/sep/08/french-pensions-michael-white

Ahh, this was the article I was searching for:
French horror at 'Anglo-Saxon' welfare reforms:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8988132.stm

Actually, I thought I was posting warnings about the dangers of allowing declines in service ...

Some cutbacks are reasonable. In my own opinion, curbside garbage pickup is eminently reasonable and any higher level of service isn't a reasonable use of public money. In my own opinion. I don't happen to see a need for weekend mail delivery, either. That's me.

Super-mailboxes in new housing developments aren't exactly unreasonable. In apartment and condo blocks, tenants pick up their mail from their locked box in the mailroom. In suburbs, householders pick it up from their locked box in the super-mailbox at the corner of the street. Not a huge inconvenience. And keep in mind that many suburbs (like my sister's) consist of large houses on large lots, which makes door-to-door delivery take a good twice as long (thus costing more) as it does in a dense urban neighbourhood like mine.

Rita, what I was saying about picking up your mail that didn't get delivered related to the "privatised" part of our service: package delivery. Things that are too large for the regular letter carriers to carry door to door. (That does mean pretty much anything from a book on up, as a couple of packages like that would mean a very heavy load for the postie.)

We all know, here, at least in all my family's experience, that the private delivery services that handle packages just don't bother delivering packages, they go out the next day and leave failed-delivery notices in the door. It's happened to me when I was home, it's happened to my sister when she was home, it's happened to my and No.1's mothers when they were home. You can call to arrange re-delivery rather than picking up, I think, but sometimes you just don't want to wait for it, and wait around for it, hoping it works that time.

It used to be that the post office delivery van driver would knock on a neighbour's door and ask them to accept delivery if nobody was home. No longer.

So it was a cautionary tale -- what you *might* be looking at if you allowed privatisation of the post!

Interesting, SRS.

The French look over at the Anglo-Saxons the way we in Canada look south at the Yanks. We don't want to be like them, be it health care or gun laws.

Many of us here think we should set our sights higher than just not being like our neighbours to the south. We should look farther abroad and consider being more like the French ... or even, on some points, like the Anglo-Saxons. ;)

I think we're getting off the point a little.

Janey is reminding us of what we could be facing if the Royal Mail is privatised.

To my mind, the point isn't how we'd cope with a privatised service. It's that there are some elements of life (post, gas, electricity, public transport etc) which are essentially public services, and which therefore need to be paid for by all the public, ie through taxation.

That way, if you live in a remote part of the UK, you will get the same service as if you live in leafy Surrey.

Not to worry, though - in Cameron's Big Society, all the out-of-work postmen will be delivering the mail voluntarily ....... not!

Sue x

To be honest, I don't mind if we go off the point a little :) . I always seem to go off at a tangent lol, I don't mind if others do so on a thread I started.

I once started a very serious thread on big brother and 1984, everyone stopped by to chat and say hello as I hasn't posted in a while, i don't think one person actually answered the question lol

My worry about privatisation, (in fact it doesn't have to be just privatisation), my worry is that in some respects standards are slipping in a lot of areas. People aren't getting the service they once were. In some cases, it doesn't affect me much but it can affect others. Wheelie bins seem to be a big issue, I'm able to take my bins out (we were able to do this for an elderly neighbour when she was alive) but no all elderly people can do this. I wonder how they cope. Not all elderly people can leave their homes to pick up post. They may be able to come to some arrangement but again it may be an inconvenience.

I'm just wondering whether everything is looked at in terms of profit these days. Yes I want businesses to be run efficiently and effectively. I don't see the point in needless waste. I think some businesses have got too greedy though, they want bigger profits and less customer service. (I hate those automated tills in supermarkets). Some services however, need to be supported in my opinion like the NHS, postal service etc....

Sorry I think I've gone off at a tangent again.

PS what about those out of work librarians Suzian - I don't agree with that. Why doesn't Cameron run the government voluntarily? After all he can afford to - maybe we should only pay Prime ministers if they can't afford to live otherwise? ;)