Tag Archives: Royal Mail

General

Parcel Farce

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Usually when I’m ordering something, I try to have it delivered to work – the theory being that at work there is usually someone around to sign for the parcel, and you’re not going to have problems with forged signatures and parcels propped up against the front door. However every so often we have to have something delivered to our home address, as it has been with a parcel that we were supposed to receive on Tuesday. Unfortunately the company from which we were purchasing requires that for credit card purchases, the package has to be shipped to the credit card address, and it was shipped with Parcel Force, the parcel delivery arm of the Royal Mail.

When we first moved here, we had problems because being a new build, the road wasn’t on any of the maps. Eight years on, we’re on all the latest sat-nav data, indeed you can put our address into Google Maps and take a nice look at our back garden. Recently about the only problem we’ve had has been the occasional Tesco delivery driver who ends up in Penrose Park (worth noting at this point that it Ocado equip their drivers with a sat-nav, so we’ve never had a problem with them).

Anyway, both yesterday and today there has been no sign of the parcel, nor any sort of card. Thankfully the company sending the parcel supplied me with the tracking code so I could see what was happening, and it came as somewhat of a surprise. They have twice failed to locate the address – it escapes me quite why having failed to find it on Tuesday they didn’t at least look us up on a map to try and find us on the Wednesday – but twice they have failed to find it. Incidentally, the top item on the tracking is my redirecting the parcel to our local post office, where since we know the post mistress quite well, hopefully there should be no problem picking the parcel up without the card. Annoyingly it takes Parcel Force two days to actually get the parcel to the local post office, so we’ll have to wait until Friday until we can go and collect it, plus they’ll charge us 50p for the redirection. That’s a lot less than the £5.50 they’d charge to redirect it anywhere else. The only other option is to drive to the other side of Reading to collect it in person, but I fear after the farce this week I’ll probably not be at my best with whoever happens to be on the desk if I did.

It just amazes me that a company whose primary business is delivering packages is unable after two attempts to find our house. Granted if we were in an out of the way place, or a brand new house it would be understandable, but the house is eight years old, and the road is on sat-nav, map, whatever, why on earth is it so difficult for them to deliver our parcel?

Update: You’d think this was complicated. I’ve just had an e-mail back from Parcel Farce customer service saying that they had “resolved the address problems” and that the parcel was back out on the van to be delivered to my home address – I’ve just phoned them up, and once through their automated system to a real person (hint, press the ‘#’ key on your phone a few times and you can get out of the menu system) and she had checked, it seems that the parcel is indeed on the normal delivery route, not being sent to our local post office as requested. The customer service agent said that she could send a message to the driver to make sure he delivered it to the local post office instead, although that proved to be complicated as the list of local post offices on her system bizarrely doesn’t list our local post office at all, despite the list on the main website including it. So place your bets please, do you think they’ll actually manage to deliver the parcel to the right place by the weekend?

Update 2: Parcel all delivered. Looking at the paperwork attached to the box the initial instruction to redirect the parcel was actually received, although after having accepted that instruction they then had another failed attempt to deliver to the house. What is interesting is that the customer service agents you speak to seem to have no more information than the tracking system gives you so can’t tell where a parcel is actually going, hence all the confusion in the middle of the week.

Current Affairs, Politics

The Last Post

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So today we had the last post we’re going to get for the next week, as the Royal Mail Workers kick off another round of strikes – this time it is a pair of forty-eight hour strikes designed to ensure that nothing gets delivered for the best part of a week. Whilst businesses can increasingly switch to courier services (and some say that they are getting a 60% increase in enquiries during the strikes) those of us who have items coming through the regular domestic door-to-door deliveries are left waiting as the Royal Mail staff attempt to send the company into an even more dire situation by forcing some of their most valuable customers onto the competition…

Current Affairs

Royal Mail – Striking Themselves Out of Business?

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Has anyone sat down to work out how much long term business Royal Mail is losing as a result of the ongoing strikes – strikes which are again being extended. Back in the days when Royal Mail held a monopoly, perhaps striking was effective – but in the present climate, with Royal Mail already struggling to compete, they are striking their employer out of business, people will go elsewhere.

Take me as an example, last week Amazon failed to deliver an express parcel to me when they said – not through any fault of theirs, but because of the strike action. However as per their policy they repaid the fee. Another letter that was supposed to arrive either Friday or Saturday finally turned up on Tuesday. As a result, when today I needed to have something shipped, and the site gave me a choice of Royal Mail or DHL for next day delivery – I opted for DHL. It cost a few pence more, but at least I had some confidence it would actually arrive next day.

Royal Mail has already lost the Amazon second class contract – if they carry on like this I can certainly see the express delivery contract going too – even the government themselves are turning away from Royal Mail!

I can certainly understand staff wanting to be paid more, but Royal Mail was losing customers before the strikes started – and this is only making things worse. Is putting your employer out of business really the way to go? Ultimately it won’t hurt the management – they’ll have no problems moving on elsewhere if the company hits more serious trouble. The people it hits are the general public who have no choice over who delivers to their doorstep, and the postal workers themselves – if the company loses business, it is they who will lose their jobs.

General

Picking Up a Parcel in Reading

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Reading Sorting Office

One of the more annoying hassles we discovered when we moved to our present house was that we had moved into a postcode delivered from the sorting office in Reading, rather than the more convenient offices in Wokingham or Crowthorne.

Although in general it’s not too much of a problem where our post comes from, if the postman is unable to deliver a package for some reason, it does mean that we have to go into the centre of Reading to pick it up. Unlike most of the parcel delivery companies the Royal Mail have their main site right in the centre of the town, adjacent to the railway station – due in part of course to needing to be close to the railway for Post Office Train.

If you look at the picture, the sorting office is the big building in the bottom of the shot, with the parcel collection office being in the top left corner. The car park containing all the red vans is where the Royal Mail park their vans, and the other car park is for the Vastern Road retail park, which includes a few large retail units and a TGI Friday’s Restaurant. Bear in mind that the largely empty situation in the rest of the car park is pretty normal – very rarely is that car park full. The only available parking, and indeed the parking everybody uses is in the retail park car park.

Anyway, today Beth went off into town to pick up a parcel, and drove into the car park. Being a Saturday morning, TGI Friday’s was closed, and the rest of the car park wasn’t busy, so she went to park in one of the spaces by the sorting office. When she got out, there were new signs warning that the car park was not for use of Royal Mail customers, and someone further up was arguing with some clampers, who had clamped their car in the few minutes it had taken for the person to go in and collect their parcel. Apparently since Wednesday they have been sitting in that part of the car park watching for people parking and going to the sorting office and then clamping them – cost being £120 to release the car. Whilst of course it is their car park, and they can limit access to whoever they like, with the amount of space their usually is in that car park it does seem to be a tremendous own goal by the owners of the retail park to annoy large parts of their potential customers by clamping them for collecting a parcel. Needless to say, the topic has kicked off discussion elsewhere, and even made the local paper. Locals are well advised to find somewhere else to park when they need to collect a parcel.