Royal Mail

Our last postie resigned because he was regularly given clapped out vehicles which kept breaking down. The last straw came when he was expected to drive a van with bald tyres! In our rural location most people rely on the dreaded Amazon etc for a lot of things. It was horrific to see how quickly the pile of parcels grew at the nearest post office, to the point where you could hardly get through the door. In the end another postie, officially on sick leave, brought everything in a big van to the village hall, where we all queued up like refugees waiting for food parcels, to gratefully receive our mail.

Funny they never,ever deliver when it is raining or bad weather.

I opted out of junk mail some time ago and get very little of it now.

@albertina

Not sure why it all changed and why they are losing out to other companies. Even ebay seems to promote other companies ahead of the post office for delivery.

One of the main reasons people aren't using rm these days is that they're so expensive.
If I send a package by RM and I want tracking info, as soon as you get to about 250g in weight, it's over £3, but you can send anything up to 1kg with Evri for under £3, with tracking. So now, the only time I use RM is if I'm sending something abroad and Evri don't offer a service to that particular country, otherwise, I find Evri to be far faster and more reliable than RM

We also get post around twice a week. Although a postie is in the village every day. I have heard numerous people from other areas complain of the same. I know our posties (well they used to be ours before being sold off) have to work harder than ever now.

If the "junk" mail has your name and address on it, they are duty bound to deliver it because they have an obligation to the sender who entrust RM to deliver their advertising mail. If you don't want to receive it, your beef is with the sender, not RM.

There are several ways of stopping it: write to the company and ask to be taken off their mailing list, or, put two strikes through your address (do not obliterate it) and mark each letter that you don't want as "unsolicited mail, RTS" (Return to Sender) and put it back in the post box. Your postman will receive it back, take note of the two strikes and return it to sender for you. I worked 20 years for RM and this is how the system works.

The form to stop the junk mail that esme123 is talking about, is for the unaddressed items (flyers) that the postmen deliver along with regular mail.

Let Amazon buy them out! They seem to have deliveries sorted!

Royal Mail have never managed to return to the levels of service that we had pre-covid - target for first class mail to be delivered the next day is 93%, they are currently managing barely 70%! I am a member of Royal Mail's customer panel - which is how they get the figures for what mail gets delivered when. I send items to other panellists and receive items myself, some from individuals and some from businesses. All this is logged via an app so they can track how long various types of mail are taking to arrive. In my first few years on the panel, they were close to their target of 93% almost all the time, barring particularly busy periods such as Christmas. During covid, the service went severely downhill and has still not recovered. The service is terrible at the moment, and the strikes have not helped.

Our postie is in our street daily and we get addressed mail about twice a week mostly catalogues for different clothing companies and a junk mail drop about once a week , unfortunately the junk mail companies pay royal mail to deliver their leaflets and that keeps people in jobs so don't feel I should complain about too much, it only takes a few minutes to put it in the recycling bin.🙄 , the post box down the road is collected in the early morning but the things I post usually get there in a day or so even with a second class stamp.

I haven’t had any post for 3 days, not even junk mail, which is unusual.

Well my postman is on holiday for 3 weeks and there's no cover. Last time he was away for a week we had no post. I'm sort of expecting they will drop some post off next week but I am not sure. I don't know how people operate business but I expect that they have long gone elsewhere.

You can opt out of junk mail if you download the form and send it off.

I have post about 11 am. Mainly bank statements or bills.
Last week I received a Christmas card from Barbados posted on 10th December last year with stamps the equivalent of £2.50.

Ilovecheese

But, but, it is a private company now, so it must be better than before!

I went to a postbox on a housing estate one evening. It was so full that I could have lifted handfuls of mail out of it.

Our post was so bad that it made the front page of the Sunday Times. No post at all. We had to go to the sorting office to ask for our post. Since the bad publicity, we now get post twice a week, but post boxes aren't emptied often so it's better to post a birthday card at least a week in advance.

You dont need to be a business to order a home collection if you use the "click and drop" online service.

We must be lucky - no complaints here. We get post almost every weekday, inc. Saturdays.

Postman has collected big heavy Click and Drop parcels - no charge - and the parcels I send regularly via click and drop from SW London to a charity in Yorkshire, have almost always arrived the next day.

The Royal Mail also Collect from home, which is wonderful for not lugging parcels to the PO. Just book and pay online and he collects the next day. When the system was down one day I had to go to the PO, where I discovered that some of the online services are cheaper, or not even available at the PO, and only available online

I have a weekly business collection from my home and sometimes order an ad hoc one mid week. These collections are a life saver for a non driver like myself. They work out cheaper and far more convenient than having to get a taxi to the post office and wait in a queue.

But do you honestly know many people who would be likely to send you a letter, or even a bill, through the post?

For years postal services have been becoming poorer and at the same time much more expensive to use, so nowadays anything important enough to need your immediate attention is sent by e-mail or fax.

We get two local newspapers and advertisments from local shops once a week. Apart from that a letter perhaps once every three months or so.

Does the UK not have an online service where you can decline junk mail? We have, and it works - we only receive ads from firms we want them from.

We get a delivery twice a week. That’s all. Worse than the days of the pony express but that’s Australia for you. No one even bothers to complain any more.

Having same problem as you.
In one week I only received 5 pieces of mail. One letter I received was dated 2 weeks prior to delivery!!
What had happened to the Royal Mail, going downhill fast in my opinion
If they can't be bothered delivering mail to people's letter boxes anymore (now they got their pay rise)! Let's do it the American way have a bank of locked mail boxes that way Royal Mail can get rid of thousands of employees and we might get a reasonable postal service.

They don’t work very efficiently, I can vouch for that. Sometimes we’ll get a parcel delivered by a RM van and an hour or so later, another parcel will get delivered by a different RM van.

My sister's 60th birthday card took 3 weeks to arrive 1st class post. Last month a small parcel took 2 weeks to arrive. Both were Bristol area Patchway and BS4 sorting offices have problems atm. Read over 50 comments on an Internet site with people waiting for recorded delivery parcels up to 5 weeks.
I'm now using Evri and so far much better 3 to 5 days but a bit more expensive for over 1kg. At least it gets there and has tracking.

Here in Northern Ireland we get post 2 or 3 times a week. There is very little of interest, its mostly junk mail.