Tag Archives: post office

A post on post

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Royal Mail price risesOur annual moan at Royal Mail follows with a mild sorry to regular readers who’ve been here before.

Royal Mail have put up their stamp prices, just 11 months after the last increase. They now charge £3.00 for a small first class parcel (e.g ten pairs of DreamGirl earplugs), or £2.60 Second Class. It’s a lot, we’re sure you’ll agree.

Once again, Snorestore has been forced to get creative and try to minimise the impact to you.

However, the miserable facts are these: we can’t absorb all the increase and have passed on some of it to you.

Better news: while Royal Mail have whacked their charges up by as much as 17.5% for small parcels and 7.5% for large letters, we’ve kept our price rises to around 5%. Next Working Day delivery costs the same as Royal Mail.

Even better news: we’ve reduced some postal charges by 20%, better to reflect the actual cost. So for example, the cost of posting a ten pair pack of LaserLite earplugs first class used to be £1.25. We’ve brought it down to £1. And of course, if you opt for second class, most items with a value of up to £14.95 have no delivery charges added at all.

Better news still: we’ve extended the cut-off time for dispatching orders the same day from 2pm to 3pm. Order by 3pm and you could still have your earplugs the next morning (if Royal Mail pull their fingers out that is).

One other point: until 2nd April any items posted with a value of up to £46 were automatically covered by Royal Mail’s insurance if they were lost or damaged in transit. Royal Mail have arbitrarily reduced this cover to just £20. Pathetic. As a result, if you order earplugs etc worth more than twenty quid, we could decide to send them to you in two or more packets.

Confused? Email us or see the Shipping page on the Snorestore website.

Postal update

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Interesting discussion in the Post Office the other day (we are traditional types and take all our mail to our local sub post office for despatch):

Apparently the new postal charges which Royal Mail imposed on 21st August have led to a massive reduction in the amount of packets being sent. Although this is anecdotal at this stage, it appears that some eBay sellers (and buyers, presumably) are simply not able to get their heads round the new tariffs and have stopped trading completely, at least for the time being.

The knock-on effect is of course a loss of revenue for Royal Mail and in particular, the local post office network. Sub postmasters/mistresses are usually franchise holders and only get paid according to how much money crosses their counter.

In the short term this is bad news for Royal Mail (serves them right) but for the people who run our local post offices, it’s a complete disaster. Here in Harrow, we lost 6 sub offices last year. The fear is, that more will follow as postmasters/mistresses give up the struggle to make a profit.

We at Snorestore suspect that this was part of Royal Mail’s plan all along. Post Office Counters is the loss-making arm of the service. Put up prices, confuse the customers, see a drop in trade, close lots more sub offices by default. For Royal Mail this would be a result. For the communities served by these outlets, it’s a tragedy.