Royal Mail today launches a special delivery service in a direct challenge to courier firms.
The ailing group hopes the service will generate £100million in new business.
Packages will be delivered by 9am the next working day, with prices starting at £6.95.
A Royal Mail spokesman said the company aims to take 25% of the special delivery market, which has expanded by 66% in five years.
Read MoreSwaddles Organic, the popular online organic butchers and grocery suppliers, has appointed Beck & Call, London’s multi-award winning, niche home delivery company, to provide its customers living in the capital with a personalised home delivery service – delivery of its fabulous organic meats and other grocery produce within two hour slots between 12noon & 9.00pm, three days a week. This will be the first time Swaddles customers living in London will be able to have their organic produce delivered direct to their door at a time of their choosing.
Read MoreYou’ve seen the eye-catching green vans around town and heard your friends talk of their fabulous home delivery service, but are you one of the few Londoners who has still to use Beck & Call, one of London’s best-kept secrets?
Beck & Call is an absolute must for those busy consumers who shop by mail order or on the Internet. The company provides a simple, yet invaluable, service – delivery of packages to consumers’ homes within one hour windows of the customer’s choice, from 7am-11pm, seven days a week. With many national parcel carriers unable to commit to delivery times, much to the frustration of consumers shopping from home, Beck & Call provides its customers with a straightforward service which, to date, is proving extremely popular.
Read MoreWith days to go before we know if 160,000 Royal Mail workers have voted for the first national postal strike since the one that was led by the now Labour Education Minister, Alan Johnson, in 1996. Most seasoned observers have little doubt as to the outcome. Martin O’Neill, chairman of the commons Trade and Industry Select Committee, says: ‘I think they will get a stonking majority for strike action.’
A strike would be very difficult for Royal Mail, which is now in the second year of a three-year plan initiated by chairman Allan Leighton. This involves cost-cutting and 30,000 redundancies to turn around the group’s pounds 1.1 billion loss in the year to March 2002. Officials insist there is no room for brinkmanship, despite last week’s appeal to the workforce by Leighton and chief executive Adam Crozier to accept their 14.5 per cent productivity-related pay offer – raising pay to pounds 300 a week – or risk ‘commercial suicide’.
Read MorePostal union leaders are developing plans for a series of short, sharp, targeted stoppages in mail deliveries if their members vote for strike action in the pay dispute with the Royal Mail.
The Communication Workers’ Union leadership wants to maximise the impact of strike action while minimising the potential for long-term damage to their members and RM itself.
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