Author: Archive

THE attitude in Londonderry to yesterday’s newly-introduced mail pricing system was a mixture of confusion and frustrating countdown.

While some customers outside the main Post Office in Custom House Street and the Carlisle Road Post Office predicted confusion, others said it would take a few months ” possibly during the run-up to Christmas ” to feel the full impact of the biggest shake-up the postal system has seen in 165 years.
Janice Tracey, CEO of Londonderry Chamber of Commerce, claimed yesterday it is possible to minimise the impact of the new postage pricing system for all business and residential post.

“From now, businesses will have to pay more attention to the size and shape of post than to the weight in order to avoid being penalised by the changes,’ she said.

Next time you buy a birthday card, ask yourself: is it more than 240 mm long, 165 mm wide or 5 mm thick? If so, then forget about dispatching it with a simple first-class stamp. You will need a “large letter” version. For, as of yesterday, the Royal Mail is categorising post by size as well as weight, in order to “rebalance its prices in line with costs”.

The new arrangement is “fairer and simpler”, says the Royal Mail. Simpler? In that case, we dread to think what a more complicated system would look like.

As for fairer, that also stretches credulity. Pricing in Proportion (PiP), as it is officially known, is likely to prove irritating and expensive for small businesses and associations, which may now have to choose between paying more for very light A4 letters and laboriously folding them.

These fears are groundless, says the Royal Mail: far from being a bizarre innovation, PiP is already used by the Japanese, German and Singaporean post offices – where, unsurprisingly, it runs with formidable efficiency.
And then there is the effect on post offices themselves. In rural areas, struggling sub-post offices usually provide a friendly and helpful service. Their urban equivalents, in contrast, are often appalling places, with their stained carpets, faded 1980s interior design – and, above all, insufferable snaking queues, which are so long that advertisers station video screens for shuffling customers.

For years, it has taken Stakhanovite determination to enter a city centre post office; one look at the ratio of staffed to unstaffed booths is enough to make the heart sink. Just imagine how protracted your visit could become now that letters have to be measured as well as weighed. Thank God for e-mail.

Confused customers say changes to the cost of sending letters and parcels will cause long delays in post offices.

Royal Mail has changed the first and second class system and replaced it with 29 pricing categories.

Under the changes, introduced yesterday, it will cost no more to send most letters.

However, it will be more expensive to send some larger items, regardless of how heavy they are.

Customers said the system was too complicated, while experts said not enough warning had been given to allow people to prepare for the price rises.

Small businesses leaders have warned firms could resort to passing the extra mailing costs on to consumers.

Royal Mail said the overhaul was necessary because it was more expensive to sort and deliver bulkier items and a multi-million pound advertising campaign had made the system easy to understand.

A spokeswoman from the post office in High Street, Great Easton, Harborough, said: “The rate bands have increased – so, if you send a first class item, you can make it up to 100g when it used to be 60g.

“We had a man with a letter who sent it for 90p when it would have cost GBP 1.90 before.

“Most of our regular users will save money.”

However, many customers at Leicester’s main post office, in Bishop Street, said the system was confusing and would cause longer delays.

Sending letters used to be simple – if increasingly expensive. Yesterday it got more complicated amid widespread confusion and suspicion that the Royal Mail was trying to make a fast buck.

From now on the cost of posting letters and packets varies according to their shape, thickness and weight. This replaces a long-standing system in which first class stamps cost 32p, second class stamps cost 23p and items weighing more than 60g varied in price according to weight.

A spokeswoman for the consumer group Postwatch said people were “utterly confused” by the change. The organisation registered deep concern about how the new pricing structure was being introduced.

Its study of more than 300 post offices in the first week of August showed that a third did not have any information for customers on the new system, called Pricing in Proportion (PiP).

The new system is expected to cause particular confusion among those buying greetings cards, which vary considerably in size, but less so in weight.

The changes attracted a mixture of bafflement and suspicion among customers. In a post office near St James Park, central London, Amanda Kershen said she found the system complicated, despite reading the leaflet she had received. “I’ll be very reluctant to send any packages. It’s going to cause pandemonium,” she said. “I was sent a sizing guide to my home which was helpful but the first thing I thought was, ‘this is going to be stressful’.”