Postal Strike

[Chimp]

Im going to rant about the postal strike... now firstly i understand why it happened, im not annoyed that those people decided to strike, but the powers that be really should have sorted the situation before the strike came into play.

the problems it has caused for me are just stupid, from a business point of view i have more customers than i can count telling me that there account payments are "in the post" not to mention delays on lots of special stock orders that i have placed.

from a personal point in 7 days they have been unable to get a package what is essentially just a few junctions down the M3, its the randomness that annoys me, i ordered some LEDs from a place in middlesborough, even with the strike they arrived friday of last week a total of 3 days for the lenght of england..... london to winchester (about 70 miles) 1 week gone and still nothing!

things like this really get my goat, in my opinioun 100% avoidable, its tradgic that these people need the strike action to get the powers that be to listen to them, it really is, for average people its not even as if they have a choice as to use another provider.

somewhere there was a person who before all this started, sat back in there nice office, on there nice fat paycheck who wasnt interested in preventing this strike IMHO, only interested in protecting there own bonus i bet...

rant over :(

[Lexus2D]

U aint alone im avin probs 2 & can u get 2 speak 2 a peron @ Royal Mail NOOOOOOOOO :tsktsk:

Stupid dumb computer systems that do not understand the human voice :tsktsk:

[Chimp]

hehe, im sick of that thing!

its just annoying, spend a fiver on something un-important that you dont mid waiting for and it comes special delivery in 3 days... wac over 100 notes on something that is importnat and you do need in a hurry and has less than a 10th of the distance to travel and it takes over a week!

[Dave-Ellen]

tell me about it...........

[Tango]

tell me about it...........

Had a phone call from a secretary in Houston, Texas requesting my home address as she needed to send me an item...that was Thursday late morning (early morning their time as -6 hours GMT). Fedex package arrived for signed delivery on Friday morning, the following day...beat that Parcel Force or whatever you're calling yourself nowadays.

[kam05]

Some of my eBay purchases are stuck in the royal mail backlog, been waiting for 3 weeks now............

[sparkystav]

Same here, Everything i've ordered before and since the postal strike has arrived except a PS2 pad!

I've mailed them twice but they keep blaming the strike rather than just tracking the parcel or sending me a new one! getting annoyed waiting!

Stav

[Chimp]

Same here, Everything i've ordered before and since the postal strike has arrived except a PS2 pad!

I've mailed them twice but they keep blaming the strike rather than just tracking the parcel or sending me a new one! getting annoyed waiting!

Stav

now as a seller myself i can see there problem, they cant just send another one out, you just cant run a business that way, the only way around it for them is to charge you for a second one then when the original arrives with you, you send it back and they give you a full refend

from a consumer point of view your stuffed in these situations, unless the delivery time breaches any T & Cs that are stated at tiem of ordering there isnt much that can be done to be honest (our T & Cs on our site are 28 days delivery time, it normally is next day with UPS so we really do cover our tails)

royal mail are rubbish, have been for ages, parcel farce used to loose at least 10 packages a week from us, (we send around 500 packages out a week) its all one in the same and so poorly run its unreal.

i have a friend who works in the sorting office in eastleigh (apparantly one of the largest in the UK) and the royal mail idea of staffing is the most they can afford (e.g if they have a 30k budget for staff in a certain area in the sorting office they prefer to employ 3 polish, turks, or whatever who dont speak english rather than 2 competant people who can speak & read fluent english) i dont mean this in a racist mannor, not at all im just refering to what a friend of mine has told me. his job is keeping a team of 10 people working efficiently in there, of those 10 they are all polish, only 1 of them speaks english so he has to double up as a translator... its madness isnt it??

what we need to do (and im not kidding here) is boycott these numptys once and for all, DHL, UPS and several other indepandant firms can deliver post aswell as packages, it does cost more, but really, its worth it. the postage on my LEDs was £1.84 for a 3 day service. UPS would have charged me £5 but that would have been for a GARUNTEED next day service. not like royal mails special delivery which is NOT garunteed.

we sent all our invoices out this month by UPS because of the postal strike, every single one arrived, every single one had a signature for us to track against if we need to. yes it cost us more ebcause normally we have a franking machine through royal mail, but if you do the math its not that much cheaper than normall.

royal mail cost..... 100 x 26p stamps = £26 (for 100 invoices)

UPS Cost.... 100 x £0.45 = £45 (for 100 invoices)

so another £14 per 100 invoices and none go missing, on a normall month of our 1000s of customers i must get at least 100 calls saying invoices have never arrived, i cant argue the toss, i just have to wait even longer for my money while i issue another invoice and send it again (normally recorded which costs me about £1!)

personally if i was given the choice when ordering goods for delivery, pay £15 and have parcel farce or royal mail deliver it or pay £30 and have it on a garunteed next day courier such as city link or UPS i would more often than not pay the difference.

im narked because once again they have been in today and once again delivered about 2 letters and thats it! weird thing is its post dated the 23rd so where the hell is all the stuff im outstanding from last bloody week!

[Ryo]

yeah blows dont it

i work for the RM, i didnt even get the chance to vote, its not nice driving thru a pikit line every night to fuel the truck up, then after the shift aswell,.

oh when you get your bills and letters and all them, they might have dhl and tnt sigs on them but the RM do the delivering, unless you courier everything out, RM still do the walking.

its only the network thats changed the final bit is still rm

but then again, im only a postie

[Chimp]

ahh, i have found out something new today then Ryo. :D

i hope you dont take offense to any of the above. im not digging at any emplyee of royal mail, merely the top brass of the company. personally i think the strike action was justified, i just feel that it should never have got that far in the first place.

to add insult to injury i get home today to find a package waiting for me that i ordered last wednesday night.

its only come from HONG KONG! seriously, how can Hong Kong to southampton be faster than london to southampton! lol

[HUMAN-ERROR]

Not wanting to shift any blame (but doing so anyway) but some eBay sellers and shocklingly even some companies, are being lazy when sending stuff out, and then blaming the strikes!!

I'm also a postman, and I ordered a boot spoiler for my omega round the time of the first strike, and i rang him a week later just to keep him on his toes, asking where it was (knowing full well strikes had affected) and he said it was on its way, and when it arrived another 8 days later he'd only posted it 4 days before it reached me!