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Royal Mail could save £650m by switching service to three days a week, says Ofcom
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Canadian here - sorry if I don't know exactly how it works on your side of the pond.. but isn't your national post serving an important competitive function, keeping other (fully private) mailing and courrier services in the pricing ballpark?
If it reduces the quality of service, it won't suddenly reduce the need to receive stuff by mail (particularly in this new Amazon world), and private companies would fill the void - at the consumer's expense, no?
So for most people royal mail is not particularly competitive for parcels.
They're great for letters, and if you live somewhere that's hard to get to they are often the only option for parcels. But for most people, most deliveries from Amazon etc won't come via them. Instead they'll come via much cheaper and crappier private companies.
That's for two reasons. 1. Because royal mail has to deliver everywhere for a similar price, the prices for easy destinations are more expensive and subsidize people living in hard to reach locations. 2. They pay their staff an actual salary rather than per package delivered.
So you have a parcel operation that can't make money because it is stuck with uniform pricing across the country, and a letter business which used to make money but is slowly dying.
Royal Mail is fully private; no part of it is nationally owned.
It was sold off on the cheap a decade ago (while it was still profitable) with a major "caveat emptor" stipulation that the universal service obligation would remain as it was.
The private owners have since hived off the profitable parcel delivery arm (GLS) into a legally distinct entity, and have started whinging that the now isolated letter delivery business is unprofitable without degrading the service obligation.
It's a cynical move.