The Royal Mail is Doomed

Britain without the Royal Mail? ThRoyal Mailat’d be, well, un-British. But, like Woolworths, it’s coming to the end of its natural life after 500 years.

Realising this, it was sold out of public ownership in 2013 in the hope this would give it the flexibility to adapt and change with the times. Form most of its life it’s existed to provide communication in the form of letters. It survived the introduction of the telephone – in fact it used to run that too, messed it up and had that part of the business privatised as British Telecom in the 1981. This didn’t stop BT doing some odd things (like selling the division running these new-fangled mobile phones), but it has replaced the dwindling demand for fix-line domestic telephone calls by selling infrastructure of networking instead. BT are doing rather well at it.

Fax, and then email, has really put a dent in written communication. Who sends letters any more (apart from idiots)? However, the Internet has resulted in a massive boom in on-line commerce, and physical products still need delivery to the purchaser. Royal Mail plc needs to re-invent itself as a delivery company, and use its existing infrastructure to do it better than the start-ups who are filling the void. Unfortunately it’s doing spectacularly badly at this, whatever it’s accounts say.

Hereabouts, our two nearest Post Offices are closing, in spite of there still being a demand. There’s always a queue. The Post Office was their advantage – you could visit it to drop off a parcel and pay the postage on it at the same time. If you can’t do this, you may as well have an account with some other carrier, who’ll pick up from your premises without any fuss. Royal Mail will, if you’re big enough.

But the big problem they have is delivery. With another courier, it’s not a problem. They’ll always follow instructions and leave it across the road, where we have an agreement to take each others’ deliveries. Not a problem. If that doesn’t work they drive past a few hours later and there’s always someone around to handle it.

But Royal Mail has a “better idea”. They stuff a card into your post box telling you to collect your parcel the following day, from your local Post Office. (The one they’re just closing) And your local Post Office parcel department is only available until noon.

Whilst I like my local postman, and the people in the parcel office, the reality is that other shipping companies provide a much better service whereas they’re constrained by crazy working practices, partly fought for by their own trade union.

Unless Royal Mail can get parcel delivery right, by delivering the things to the address the sender intended, when they intended it, they’re going to be stuck with operating an almost pointless shrinking letter service, and eventually decreasing economies of scale will mean the competition can do that cheaper too.

Scam.co.uk

Scan Computers has been around for some time, and they’ve always been tricky when it comes to faulty goods (I have a pile of DOA hard disks on my shelf to prove it). Now they’ve gone a step worse. Their latest wheeze is to add ‘installation insurance’ to your order without you knowing about it. There is a check-box, but it doesn’t always seem to stick and to make it trickier they don’t add it as an invoice line, they add it to the tax and shipping.

Watch out.

They’re still using a premium rate telephone number (without the required Ofcom warning) as their sole contact method if you have query about this extra charge. Incidentally, if you want the standard rate number for them it’s 01204 474747.

Nonetheless, I’ve sent them an email asking for an immediate recharge, or I’ll put a dispute on it with the credit card company. Let’s see what happens.

It’s a shame when this happens, because the people at Scan are basically very decent and helpful when you do manage to contact them, and they’re the place to go for high-end graphics systems. Like many companies, it seems they have someone in the money-making department dreaming up such schemes in the short term, and hack-off the punters long-term. Although this was less than 0.5% of the order value (it was only applied to some cooling fans – the big stuff wasn’t covered anyway), little things like this do get noticed and create a bad feeling – and everyone has a choice. Continue reading “Scam.co.uk”