Tag: Royal Mail

Royal Mail announces today that it has now delivered over a trillion letters across the UK since records began in 1839.

The trillionth letter marks another milestone in the company’s history – further evidence of how Royal Mail has developed over the course of its 370-year history in response to customers’ needs.

The delivery of over a trillion letters comes as Royal Mail faces another change – to the way post will be priced with the introduction of Pricing in Proportion on 21 August, meaning that post will now be priced according to size and shape as well as weight.

Delivering a trillion letters in just 160 years is a feat in itself and Royal Mail anticipates that the need for mail will only continue to rise. Even in an age of alternative channels of communication, such as e-mail and texting, Royal Mail handles 84 million items a day – with no sign of this dropping. With the huge increase in internet shopping in recent years, and the UK’s continued reliance on the postal service, Royal Mail expects it should pass the second trillion milestone within the next 30 years.
A Royal Mail spokesperson commented: “Royal Mail has continually evolved over the last 370 years to ensure mail stays relevant to everyday life. Delivering a trillion letters is a remarkable achievement, and we are determined to continue delivering a consistently high quality service to our customers in the future.”’

The Royal Mail has delivered more than one trillion letters across the UK since records began in 1839, research has shown.

The postal group said it expected deliveries to continue increasing despite alternative forms of communicating such as emails and texting.

More than 84 million items are delivered every day and officials said they expected the next trillion milestone to be reached in 30 years time.

The milestone was announced ahead of changes next week to the pricing of post, which will be based on size and shape as well as weight.

Letters sent since 1839, when the Penny Black stamp was first introduced, would cover the whole of the earth 42,500 times over, the study showed.

Royal Mail is using the new wireless tracking technology, radio frequency identification (RFID), to try to improve its lamentable record for safe delivery of post.

Last year, more than 14m letters were lost or damaged and 7 percent of mail was not delivered on time, making it increasingly difficult for the Royal Mail to sell itself as a service for businesses to use. Royal Mail plans to try to identify the “black holes” into which lost post disappears and also discover the whereabouts of the bottlenecks that clog up the system.

Until the arrival of low cost RFID chips, there has been no cost-effective technology that would allow the Royal Mail to track postage flow. But RFID uses a microchip with a unique number tag that can be scanned to identify unique items.

Selected envelopes are now being identified with RFID tags and put through the system so that they can be scanned by an RFID reader when they reach their destination to record an exact arrival time. This is far cheaper than using global position (GPS) tags, which are monitored by satellite.