Tag Archives: royal mail

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.

Snow snow go away

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© Liz West (Muffet)

Just time for a reminder that if it’s snowing where you are, the chances of a postman getting to you are greatly diminshed.

Likewise, if it’s snowing where *we* are*, the chances of Royal Mail being able to process our orders as quickly as they normally do are also greatly diminished. What does this mean in practice?

To state the bleeping obvious, it means that while we will be sending your order to you in the normal way, it might take longer to reach you.

Watchword: PATIENCE.

;-)

*It is indeed snowing where we are.

Royal Mail Price Rises – update

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We’ve now begun putting into practice our response to the stamp price increases which come into force on April 30th. You can read our first response here.

From now on, you will start to see the following phrase appear against certain products on the Snorestore website:

“Please note:  this product may be supplied flat-packed to save you additional shipping costs.”

This means that we will more than likely* unbox your earplugs, still keeping them in their hygienic packaging, and send them to you together with their original box (flattened) and/or their instructions. This enables us to use an envelope which is classed as a large letter rather than a packet. It means you won’t have to pay the new £2.70 first class small packet rate for one of these items after 30th April. Most people will be paying pretty much what they are paying now and some lucky people will be paying a little less.

For some products this simply isn’t possible and there will be additional postage charges for these from April 30th. Rest assured we will not be seeking to profit from these increases at your expense. We’ve always had a policy of charging fair rates for shipping, and that’s not going to change. We will also continue to offer Second Class where we can, for those of you who aren’t in a hurry and who have an eye for a postage bargain.

We’re sorry we can’t absorb the price rises, however much we would like to and however much you would like us to. But it would be business suicide.

* if you are ordering more than one product, we might be able to leave these products in their original boxes. This is something we can only decide when it comes to packing up your order.

Getting round Royal Mail’s price rises

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Admittedly, it’s not great to have to put prices up, but we fully understand why Royal Mail is doing this. How many of us send letters regularly? Not enough of us, it seems, and letter delivery is very expensive for Royal Mail.

Snorestore of course isn’t immune to these price rises and while we have always been careful to charge as little as possible for postage and packing, we can’t absorb the new tariffs completely.  Packets in particular will cost considerably more than they do now – at least £2.70 – and packets make up the majority of our orders.

However, we have a solution in hand, which means that postage costs for some items* will cost you just the same as they do now – but only if you agree to receive your products in a slightly different format.

For example, one of our most popular products is SafeSound Original Earplugs – the 10-pair pack in particular. Currently, we charge you £1.25 in postage for this product (it costs us more than that but that’s what you pay). Under the new Royal Mail tariffs, you would have to pay £2.70 – more than twice as much. Clearly we can’t expect you to pay this on top of the product price of just £6.99.

So what we propose to do, is to unbox the earplugs, keeping them in their sealed pouch, and flatten the box. Placed side by side in a padded envelope, this product can then be classed as as a large letter size rather than a packet, which means the postage cost is massively reduced. As a result, you won’t be paying any more for postage for this item after April 30th than you do now.

SafeSound Original Earplugs unboxed

"deconstructed packaging"

The downside of this is obviously that cosmetically, it doesn’t look very tidy when you open the envelope, as you can see in this picture >>

The upside: the cost of postage and packing doesn’t have to go up. Given that Royal Mail manages to squash quite a lot of the stuff we send out, we don’t know why we haven’t done this before. We will be explaining on each product page where this can be done, that this is how the product will arrive.

*other products where we propose to deconstruct the packaging include:

Mack’s SafeSound Ultra Earplugs (10 pairs)
Mack’s SafeSound SlimFit Earplugs (10 pairs)
Mack’s DreamGirl Earplugs (10 pairs)
Mack’s PillowSoft Earplugs (2 pairs)

and others to be confirmed.

Please let us know via the comments box or by email what you think of this plan.

Patience, people, for your order is coming …

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Nasa's satellite image of snowy Britain

Snow? What snow?

Perhaps if you’d been ensconced in a cosy shuttered room, blindfolded and with some of our excellent earplugs stuffed in your ears, you’d have missed the fact that the weather outside has been pretty rubbish for the last couple of weeks.

OK. That’s pretty unlikely.

But clearly some people have indeed missed the “snow event” as the broadcasters would call it. Because this week we have had a steady stream of emails from people asking, mostly politely (some actually very rudely) where their orders are.

Royal Mail, gawd luv ‘em, have done an amazing job in the most trying of conditions to get mail out to people. But some delays have been inevitable. If your postie can’t get to work, then your mail’s not going to get sorted. Or delivered to your door.

So we’ve been alerting people to the possiblity of delays via a note on every page of our website, with a link to our own Shipping info page and from there, to Royal Mail’s.

Snorestore’s team diligently complete dozens of posting certificates a day, which are then hand-stamped by the guy who collects our mail, or by Mrs. Patel at the Post Office if our collection has been cancelled by the weather. So if your order hasn’t yet arrived, and you’re a bit anxious, just let us know (politely if poss.) and we’ll be able to show you where and when your order entered the Royal Mail system.