The antics of a postman, yesterday

It might be one to file under the category of ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ but a survey by the fun-lovin’, deely-boppin’ dudes and dudettes at Which! Magazine has revealed that… (drum roll) …postmen deliver those ‘while you were out’ cards to us WHILE WE’RE ACTUALLY IN!

More than 2,200 members of the Which! Club were asked if a Royal Mail or Parcelforce delivery type had fired one of the cards through their letterboxes while they were in residence and, amazingly, a third said of them said: “Yes! The bastards did!”

Back at the end of 2009, when Royal Mail were voted as Britain’s Worst Company, this heinous and deeply annoying practice was one of the most-repeated grievances that you had against the company – that the laziness of their delivery donkeys forced you into making a unnecessary trip to your local sorting office to collect something that should have been delivered properly in the first place.

Of course sometimes it’s our own fault. The batteries in the doorbell are dead or we’re listening to an old Sparks album at an unfeasibly high volume. But it’s the Royal Mail and the Which! Club members (and indeed all of us) need the Queen to sort this shit out.

Royal Mail have promised “firm action” while the Queen refused to comment when we rang Buckingham Palace.

Postman Pat, the cheating twat

We all know that Bitterwallet readers think the Royal Mail suck a big dog’s one but it has been revealed that from an official point of view, they’re even worse than we’ve all been led to believe.

Postcomm, who oversee the Royal Mail, have discovered that quality tests on the service had been rigged, with posties learning in advance when and where they were going to be tested.

An anonymous tip-off to Postcomm stated that the names and addresses that would be receiving test mail was circulated, meaning that extra care could be taken over those specific items of mail, leading to increased quality rating.

The abuse is said to have being occurring for several years and involved countless staff across the country from delivery workers to senior managers.

Postcomm are investigating and could take action against Royal Mail later in the year.

Hurrah! Haroo! Harrumph! The ongoing spat between the Royal Mail and their hardy army of workers appears to be over – but perversely it could be bad news for those of us who DETEST junk mail.

The Guardian are reporting that smuggled away in the small print of the agreement proposal is a pledge by Royal Mail to remove the restrictions on how much junk guff they are allowed to pump into our homes.

At present, an agreement is in place meaning that posties deliver no more than three items of junk per household every week, leaving us free to devour our bills and all of the other unwanted shit that comes as a result of us omitting to tick or not tick a tiny box on some form or other a long, long time ago.

But once the beef-settling agreement is ratified, those restrictions will go and we could find more unsolicited crap pouring through our letterboxes every day, given that the delivery of junk mail is key to Royal Mail’s operations.

Currently, Royal Mail workers deliver only about a quarter of the UK’s total junk mail and the company hopes to take business from other postal operators. All of which should do them no harm if they want to hang on to their Worst Company In Britain 2009 title…

It’s finally over. The Bitterwallet readership have spoken and the noise they are making is that Royal Mail is the Worst Company In Britain for 2009.

The Queen’s own postal service took more than a third of the vote in the end and there are many factors that led to this conclusion – a shoddy service provided by unmotivated and disinterested staff; further shoddiness caused by strikes; the price of stamps going up well above the rate of inflation; the fact (possibly untrue) that all posties knock off at midday and get to spend the rest of the day on the piss.

Either way, they’ve taken the crown from Setanta Sports and we’ll be delivering the esteemed golden turd trophy to the Royal Mail HQ in the New Year – possibly via an alternative courier company.

Thanks again to all of you who voted – we’re sure this result will be debated well into the early hours of Christmas Eve. Stick around over the holiday period as we’ll be looking for your nominations for the BEST Company In Britain 2009 over the next week or so.

Royal Mail, the company currently topping the leaderboard for our Worst Company of 2009 (vote here), are about to whack up the price of a first-class stamp. That’s clever isn’t it? First and second-class stamps will rise by 2p to 41p and 32p respectively on 6 April next year, the company said.

Regulator Postcomm announced a couple of months ago it had given approval for stamp price increases in 2010.  They’d given the green light for Royal Mail to up their price by 3p, but in a moment of almost useless goodwill, the price didn’t go up as much as possible… although, the price increase is higher than inflation.

This price hike is to compensate for the continuing decline in mail volumes. Basically, because everyone sends emails now, the price of stamp will go up to ensure that we really stop bothering altogether with a slow mail system that doesn’t always result in someone getting their letters and parcels anyway. In fact, in the past two months, I’ve had 4 things go AWOL thanks to those useless dolts.

“Stamp prices remain affordable and represent excellent value for money. Royal Mail continues to offer consumers a more extensive, to-the-door, six-days-a-week service than many European countries and does so at a lower price than most other operators,” said Royal Mail’s Alex Smith.

Yeah, but an email doesn’t even demand I leave my seat. Beat that, Olden Mail.

[BBC]

It’s proving to be the most controversial poll since the Christmas number one battle even though it’s, well, about ten thousand times more important. Yes, it’s the Bitterwallet Worst Company In Britain 2009 competition – the public vote that’s led to almost six inches of rabid complaining. Maybe Bitterwallet should have been included in the line-up? A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

Just a reminder that you’ve still got until midnight to cast your vote in what, lest we forget is JUST A BIT OF FUN REALLY AND NOT ACTUALLY THE GENERAL FUCKING ELECTION. Then, we’ll announce who you’ve voted as the worst company of the past year and the head honchos of said company will at best raise an eyebrow and carry on being shite.

Undaunted, we’ll soon be accepting your nominations for the Best Company in Britain 2009, and we’re REALLY looking forward to the warped arguments that competition will lead to.

Oh you lot: we love you to bits but GAAAAHHHHHHH!!

At long last, we bring you the final of Bitterwallet’s Worst Company In Britain 2009 competition, and not without a smattering of controversy. After studying our reports of voting patterns, we learned that the results of the second semi-final were tainted by multiple votes for DSGi, a stunt that was probably pulled by a bored paedophile or someone with an unfeasibly tiny penis, like a chipolata as viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.

As a result, the DSGi votes have been disregarded and Paypal and Orange have been put forward into the final, where they join eBay and Royal Mail. Bitterwallet’s decision is final but feel free to mewl on about it until 2010 if it’ll make you feel better.

Voting will go on until midnight on Tuesday, offering you ample time to try and hack this poll as well. But we don’t care because we have SO many other methods of determining a winner, some of which involve a pin and a top hat. Bitterwallet’s decision is final so etc etc etc…

Thrill yourselves skinny with the results to date, which are here and back by popular demand for the final is the picture of the large toy giraffe lurking outside a Travelodge. Go on then, VOTE!

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new light and we’re feeling like shining the spotlight on another pair of shabby contenders for the title of Bitterwallet’s Worst Company In Britain 2009.

The deeply troubled Royal Mail go up against the deeply troubling Barclays in today’s Clash Of The Bastards, with a place in the last eight awaiting whichever one of them amasses the most votes from you lot.

You’ve got until midnight to cast your vote and you can find out who triumphed between Phones4U and npower in yesterday’s contest here. All of the results so far can be found here. If it’s the sort of thing you’re into, you can see a picture of Santa Claus holding a gun to Jesus’ head here…

Well, we’re still reeling at the result of last night’s big vote. We can’t believe that you lot wanted Justin Colin to leave the jungle so soon. When he still had so much left to give, like… erm, well, like… ah, nope. Never mind.

Meanwhile, it was knife-edge seat-edge stuff here at Bitterwallet as 3 and Phones4U fought it out until the midnight deadline for your votes. You can see the result and find out who has made it through to round two here.

On to today and it’s a head to head between a pair of regally-named, tragically-mismanaged companies – Royal Bank Of Scotland and Royal Mail. Vote now and let us know which of them has disturbed you more in 2009. You’ve got until midnight.

The strike by staff at Royal Mail may be proving nothing short of a pain in the arse to small businesses and people expecting beer money to arrive in a birthday card in time for the weekend, but it could be worse:

[bt3a.com] thanks to Bitterwallet reader Daniel

As newspapers sober up to a future without want or need for their dead trees, Royal Mail continues to sound alarm bells about the death of the letter. Peter Mandelson has been calling for the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail, justifying the stance by claiming the system is outdated and delivery numbers continue to drop due to competition from emails and texts. The government is keen to bandy about the claim that the amount of mail being delivered has dropped by 10 per cent.

That’s not quite the case however, according to one postman. He recently posted anonymously on LRB to talk through why the figures are anything but down, but why you’re still reading headlines to the contrary. Here’s a sample from his post on why those standing on your doorstep every morning don’t believe the government’s death knell for Royal Mail:

Mail is delivered to the offices in grey boxes. These are a standard size, big enough to carry a few hundred letters. The mail is sorted from these boxes, put into pigeon-holes representing the separate walks. This is what is called internal sorting and it is the job of the full-timers, who come into work early to do it. In the past, the volume of mail was estimated by weighing the boxes. These days it is done by averages. There is an estimate for the number of letters that each box contains, decided on by national agreement between the management and the union. That number is 208. This is how the volume of mail passing through each office is worked out: 208 letters per box times the number of boxes. However, within the last year Royal Mail has arbitrarily, and without consultation, reduced the estimate for the number of letters in each box. It was 208: now they say it is 150. This arbitrary reduction more than accounts for the 10 per cent reduction that the Royal Mail claims is happening nationwide.

Doubting the accuracy of these numbers, the union ordered a random manual count to be undertaken over a two-week period in a number of offices across the region. Our office was one of them. On average, those boxes which the Royal Mail claims contain only 150 letters, actually carry 267 items of mail. This, then, explains how the Royal Mail can say that the figures are down, although every postman knows that volume is up. The figures are down all right, but only because they have been manipulated.

“Figures are down,” we chortle mirthlessly, as we load the third batch of door-to-door catalogues onto our rounds, adding yet more weight to our bags, and more minutes of unpaid overtime to our clock. We get paid 1.67 pence per item of unaddressed mail, an amount that hasn’t changed in ten years. It is paid separately from our wages, and we can’t claim overtime if we run past our normal hours because of these items. We also can’t refuse to deliver them. This junk mail is one of the Royal Mail’s most profitable sidelines and my personal contribution to global warming: straight through the letterbox and into the bin.

People don’t send so many letters any more, it’s true. But, then again, the average person never did send all that many letters. They sent Christmas cards and birthday cards and postcards. They still do. And bills and bank statements and official letters from the council or the Inland Revenue still arrive by post; plus there’s all the new traffic generated by the internet: books and CDs from Amazon, packages from eBay, DVDs and games from LoveFilm, clothes and gifts and other items purchased at any one of the countless online stores which clutter the internet, bought at any time of the day or night, on a whim, with a credit card.

You can’t help but read the full post and detect a whiff of bullshit-baffles-brains on behalf of the government. Has the internet killed the letter, or simply provided a route of communication for those too lazy to ever write one? And if online retail is harming the high street, it can’t simultaneously be damaging companies like Royal Mail, can it?

[London Review of Books]

Everyone has their favourite story about using the Royal Mail (motto: “We know where you live”). Being confronted with byzantine fee structures and packages that confound the law of conservation of matter by simply disappearing is one matter. Add an international boundary to this, and it gets complicated.

So many people worldwide are now shipping items that they sell on eBay that brushing up on the international shipping options is a necessity. The two inviolable rules of posting things abroad are:

1. Retain proof of postage
2. Retain proof of market value, such as a Paypal receipt

If you stick to these rules, you’ll at least have the option of filing a claim against the postal service and getting some compensation for items that are proved to be irretrievably lost, and you’ll have a direction to focus your anger during the 12 to 20 weeks that this process takes.

Here are your international shipping options with Royal Mail:

Surface Mail. This is the least expensive option, and it takes the longest time: two weeks to Western Europe, six weeks to North America, and 12 weeks to Australia. Packages are strapped to the back of tortoises and pointed in the general direction of the recipient’s address. If a surface mail package is confirmed to be lost or damaged, you can file a claim and receive up to the market value of the contents of the package, or £32, whichever is less. And you don’t get reimbursed for postage costs.

Air Mail. This costs roughly twice as much as Surface Mail, but delivery is much faster: three days to Western Europe, five days to pretty much anywhere else. The compensation process for lost or damaged items is the same as for Surface Mail.

International, Signed For. This isn’t a shipping option unto itself, but rather an additional £3.50 fee added onto a Surface Mail or Air Mail charge. While it doesn’t mean the package will arrive any faster, you will get a signature upon delivery and electronic tracking until the package leaves the UK. The £32 compensation for lost or damaged items remains, but get this: you can purchase extra insurance on items shipped, and you can get the cost of postage refunded if your package arrives damaged or not at all..

Air Sure. This is a service added on to Air Mail charges for the cost of £4.20, and it is only available to certain countries: New Zealand, U.S., and a bunch of European countries. These packages may also be tracked electronically until they leave the UK. Again, extra insurance is also an option, and you can get postage refunded on top of the insured value, or £32 if the package disappears or is damaged.

No matter which option you use, however, you still have to wait an excruciatingly long time for an investigation into lost or damaged packages to be completed. So consider options for shipping within Europe, including Parcelforce and DHL, with shipping costs from £13.99+VAT for packages of 5 kg or less to £26.99+VAT for packages of 25 kg or less. To the U.S. and Canada, Fedex charges anywhere from £18.03+VAT to £151.99+VAT. for packages under 6 feet (185cm) long. Fedex will also deliver to Asia starting at £18.03+VAT and ranging to £197.99+VAT.

What other international mail delivery options have you used? Please share your tips/suggestions in the comments below, and we’ll feature the best tips in an upcoming post.

With 6 days left until Christmas, some of us last minute people will soon be freaking out about the post office queues and mail delays. Explaining to your 9 year old niece how Santa’s delay is Royal Mail’s fault is just kill-joy, and only preps a happy, naive, young child for a cynical life.

But don’t fret.  Skip those post office queues by buying your postage online now.  To make things easier, Royal Mail says all you need is a computer and a printer.

Here’s Bitterwallet’s last minute summary of 5 easy steps to make sure your items make it well on their way before the big day:

1. Register

Simply register on the Royal Mail’s website.  It’s free, quick and easy. Just select which service you want, and print it yourself. If you can’t decide on what service you need, use the Royal Mail price finder. You will need to weigh your item so that you’ll know the cost to send.  And if you can’t lift it, maybe forget it.

2. Print

Fill in the recipient’s information and print onto label, envelope or paper. Pre-populated customs forms are available for international mail.

(more…)

If you posted gifts to Coventry and Warwickshire this Christmas, you may want to check that they are not being resold on eBay, as we speak.

Coventry Telegraph reports today that Royal Mail staff stole hundreds of Christmas and birthday presents at the Coventry and Warwickshire’s biggest postal depot, just shortly after postal workers in Bridgewater near a strike due to replacement of full time jobs by part time ones:

“A major investigation is underway at Bishop Street sorting office in Coventry after DVDs, lap tops, toys and games consoles went missing. It is alleged many of the items were later sold on an internet auction site. Some of the packages were Christmas and birthday presents. Royal Mail suspended a member of staff on December 4 on suspicion of theft pending an internal investigation.”. [Telegraph.net]

With 6 days left before we hit the credit crunching Christmas, could Murphy’s Law continue to prove that anything could truly go wrong?