{"id":436,"date":"2009-02-24T20:47:09","date_gmt":"2009-02-24T20:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=436"},"modified":"2009-02-24T20:47:09","modified_gmt":"2009-02-24T20:47:09","slug":"support-for-the-royal-mail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=436","title":{"rendered":"Support for the Royal Mail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Seeing as there is currently a fuss about the possible partial privitisation of the Royal Mail, it is good time to add a little support for the Royal Mail <em>as it is<\/em>. The introduction of private sector &#8220;expertese&#8221; may not improve the service for customers &#8211; indeed may make things worse. Of course those who champion the private sector claim that it will improve the service which I do not believe will be the case at all.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking in particular on parcels (as I have little interest in letters as most of them seem to be bills or junk mail), the Royal Mail delivers a service that is <em>far<\/em> better than private sector delivery companies (excluding supermarkets who seem to be able to organise deliveries far better than those whose business is making deliveries). As a single person, I am often during the working week to be found at work!<\/p>\n<p>If you order something from the Internet, you can sometimes ask for it to be delivered to your work address &#8211; if you have a co-opertive workplace (and workplace that doesn&#8217;t like workers having parcels delivered to work is to put it mildly completely bonkers). But not always.<\/p>\n<p>And of course if you have something delivered to your home address, it will normally be delivered when you are out. I happen to be home at lunchtime which gives an extra window of opportunity for the delivery people to catch me in. And what &#8220;company&#8221; manages that more than any other ? Yes, the Royal Mail.<\/p>\n<p>As it happens I have one of those little notices saying that some company tried to make a delivery and I was not in. I can ask for it to be redelivered to the same address (when I will almost certainly also be out unless I take an extra day off work), or I can pick it up from the depot. Where are all these depots ? Well they all seem to be in industrial estates miles from anywhere and almost always very difficult to get to with public transport (I don&#8217;t drive).<\/p>\n<p>Except of course for the Royal Mail who alternate between my local post office (which is less than 100 metres from my flat) or the local &#8220;big&#8221; post office, which is somewhat further but far easier to get to than some out of town industrial estate.<\/p>\n<p>If I had the choice when ordering things from the Internet, I would <em>always<\/em> opt for a Royal Mail delivery even if it were 25% more expensive. But as soon as private sector &#8220;expertese&#8221; gets to work, I dare say the Royal Mail will start behaving like other delivery companies and having cheap out of town collection depots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Seeing as there is currently a fuss about the possible partial privitisation of the Royal Mail, it is good time to add a little support for the Royal Mail as it is. The introduction of private sector &#8220;expertese&#8221; may not improve the service for customers &#8211; indeed may make things worse. Of course those who <a href='https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=436' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-7-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-72","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":437,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions\/437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}