What time do you get your mail ?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Any time between 3.00 p.m. and 5.00 p.m. Yet on Saturdays, they generally manage to post it before 12.00 noon.

[mercia]

Night Mail

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WO7JxYlhOM&feature=related

[burning dog]

Nearly all new recruits are casual


From the London Review of Books Blog

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/10/31/roy-mayall/the-future-of-work

.....The normal contract is for 38 weeks (less for the temporary Christmas workers). Staff are employed by Angard but seconded to the Royal Mail. They are required to do any work that their Royal Mail manager requests, though they are officially supervised by an Angard manager. They are not guaranteed any regular hours, and have no fixed place of work (though they will not be required to work outside the UK). They will not be paid for hours they do not work. For this they will be paid the minimum wage: £6.08 an hour (£4.98 if you’re under 21).

In other words, they will do exactly the same job as a Royal Mail employee, but for £2.78 an hour less. They could be sitting around waiting for a telephone call for days on end, to get only a few hours work a week. They can be moved from site to site and job to job at will. If they turn a job down, for any reason, they can be dismissed. Night workers are paid 50p extra an hour.....

[vinteuil]

... well I understand that the Royal Mail is currently undergoing major readjustments locally - 'upsitooticks', as our daily called it - and they have warned us that services may be disrupted de temps à autre - we have a very friendly and helpful local postman - when we first moved here in 1984 we received post between 07:00 and 08:30 - with, I think, a second (afternoon) delivery -more recently deliveries were roughly 09:00 - 11:00 - currently seems to be about 11:00 - 15:00...

[ahinton]

In the light of my "post" (sorry!) above, I endeavour to use Royal Mail as little as possible and to encourage others to do the same; I'd rather have an instantly delivered email than a hard copy letter any day if I simply cannot rely on the latter to arrive. I don;t want a "cheque in the post", because I then have to write out a credit slip for it and post it again to my bank in London so, by the time it clears, one to two weeks could elapse between the payer writing it out and the finds clearing my account whereas the "faster payment" BACS system within UK usually works within minutes (for payments from outside UK, I try to encourage people to use PayPal). I just don't see much need for a "service" that rarely works as it should, is vastly less efficient than once it was and is horrendously expensive.

[Segilla]

My post arrives at any time up to 1 pm but it's like a lot of things when retired - it matters not a lot. Much the same as what the day is or the date.

I always gave my postman a tenner, mainly because he was as friendly as a breath of fresh air. He always kept me well supplied with red rubber bands. I hope he'll still share in the Christmas box now that his wife does the round.

[mangerton]

Although our mail now arrves any time up to about 2pm, I always thought our postie was quite competent. However, I got home from work at 4.15 this afternoon to find all the mail for the eight flats in the building lying at the bottom of the stairs.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Let us not be too hard on the Royal Mail. The postal system had been consistently and progressively kicked and beaten by successive governments for as long as I can remember. It goes back to the splitting of the postal and telephone services at the time of the old G.P.O., resulting in postal services facing a financial loss, and being criticised for it. Then the profitable parcels division was opened to competition, creaming off more profit.
Even the Thatcher/Major government came to the conclusion that competition for Royal Mail would be counterproductive, Michael Heseltine leading its rejection. The market for snail-mail has shrunk still further with the rise of the internet and the predominance of the e-mail.
So to make matteres even worse, the Labour government introduced competition, with UK Mail creaming off the "easier" and more profitable commercial market.

Meanwhile, the Royal Mail has to provide a "universal" service.

[Panjandrum]

I just open Outlook and, hey presto, there's my mail; any time of the day or night.

[Petrushka]

I just open Outlook and, hey presto, there's my mail; any time of the day or night.

Fair point. So what mail do we actually get? Apart from the eagerly awaited parcels from, inter alia, Amazon, MDT and Presto all I ever have pushed through my letter box are bills, bank statements and the inevitable junk mail. One holiday company I travelled with 7 years ago still send me masses of stuff that goes unopened into the bin as any holidays I'd take now would be done via the internet. Of course all internet purchases need the Royal Mail as the end user.

Personal mail is practically non-existent nowadays. As far as work is concerned (as if I care) we receive the post at around 10.30 but previous strike action by the RM employees has led over the years to people making payments by BACS, PayPal or debit/credit cards. The bulk of our payments received at work are now made this way with cheques some way down the scale.

Don't forget that the Royal Mail own 33% of a Dutch based company that enables scam mail to enter this country. They should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/fr...00/9525992.stm

[pilamenon]

Personal mail is practically non-existent nowadays.

I don't agree. I receive quite a few cards, not just at Christmas. Moving home, birthdays, other significant events. Electronic cards are just not the same. The mail is not as important as it used to be, of course, but it has certainly received a boost from online retailing.

[Flosshilde]

In the light of my "post" (sorry!) above, I endeavour to use Royal Mail as little as possible and to encourage others to do the same; I'd rather have an instantly delivered email than a hard copy letter any day if I simply cannot rely on the latter to arrive. I don;t want a "cheque in the post", because I then have to write out a credit slip for it and post it again to my bank in London so, by the time it clears, one to two weeks could elapse between the payer writing it out and the finds clearing my account whereas the "faster payment" BACS system within UK usually works within minutes (for payments from outside UK, I try to encourage people to use PayPal). I just don't see much need for a "service" that rarely works as it should, is vastly less efficient than once it was and is horrendously expensive.

Much of the above contributes to the decline of the Royal Mail.

I don't think that the cost of sending a letter is 'horrendously expensive' - less that a pound? For that you get your post collected from a conveniently sited location, & delivered to your door.

My mail is delivered about 10.00 am. If an item can't be delivered the card is left the day after - I was told this by my postie after I'd got a card through the door, landing practically at my feet, & I caught him coming back down the stairs to protest that I was in. He said that it's to allow the postie time to get back to the sorting office with the item before the recipient went to collect it.

When the second delivery was stopped domestic customers were scheduled for later in the morning, & commercial/business customers' were scheduled for before 9.00; I never understood the logic of this.

As well as reducing the number of deliveries, the number of collections has also been reduce recently. We used to have at least two collections - am & pm - now it's only pm. My local post office told me that it's because the posties now deliver in the morning & collect in the afternoon.

I think the Royal Mail - and the Post Office - has been treated shamefully by governments (& management) hell-bent on privatising it. You can guarantee that if it is privatised, & sector 'liberalised', services will get a lot worse.

[ahinton]

I don't think that the cost of sending a letter is 'horrendously expensive' - less that a pound? For that you get your post collected from a conveniently sited location, & delivered to your door.

You might; I don't. My nearest postbox is 2.5km distant and the daily collection from it is at 09.00; my nearest post office is 3.5 km distant. Deliveries are erratic at best, given the time frame during which it occurs (see my earlier response on this) and, given the number of Special Delivery items that have gone astray since I've been in my present location, I have to stick to my view that it is a very expensive service for what i get out of it - or rather used to do until I more or less abandoned it. Email costs nothing and is almost instant.

I think the Royal Mail - and the Post Office - has been treated shamefully by governments (& management) hell-bent on privatising it. You can guarantee that if it is privatised, & sector 'liberalised', services will get a lot worse.[/QUOTE]
That may indeed be the case but, given tghe service quality and its cost to the end user, I think that it's high time that it was not privatised but closed down.

[Flosshilde]

Do you live in Hereford, or in Herefordshire? If the former I would be astonished if the nearest post box was 2.5 km away.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

If an item can't be delivered the card is left the day after - I was told this by my postie after I'd got a card through the door, landing practically at my feet, & I caught him coming back down the stairs to protest that I was in.

While we're bringing up anecdotes, I caught the postman putting a card through the door, saying I was out, when he hadn't even rung the doorbell. When I pressed him further, it turned out that he didn't have the packet either, having deliberately left it at the sorting office on the assumption that we would be out.

HEY! WHAT'S HAPPENED TO THAT SMILEY?