can the postal system survive

Graces7

HappyAsLarE wrote: »

Whew is here?

I thought An Post were obligated to deliver to every address every weekday? Maybe you just don’t have anything for you on the days they don’t come??

No. Our Post Office closed years ago and we have no island Postal Agent so we rely on the nearest mainland town Post Office. Trust me! He takes the outgoing if I leave it out for him but is only here at most 3 times a week, usually 2. Often cut off in winter.
You mean WHERE is here? small offshore island. Excellent service given the circumstances.

Graces7

badtoro wrote: »

You really like to cherry pick.

cherries?

Cee-Jay-Cee

I buy 90% of everything online and I would estimate that 75% of those deliveries are by AnPost. In my opinion they are more efficient and quicker than couriers.

SEPT 23 1989

The post office is more than just a few stamps and a post box in a community

There is a lot of things I would cut in this country before I would touch them

Not left wing before anyone starts

Bowlardo

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

The post office is more than just a few stamps and a post box in a community

There is a lot of things I would cut in this country before I would touch them

Not left wing before anyone starts

Like what? What would you cut before the post office

pearcider

GarIT wrote: »

There are laws being considered within the EU that would make it a criminal offence to pay an employee, contractor or tradesperson in cash. To prevent fraud of course, this would have a big impact on cash usage.

The EU will be gone long before that happens. The UK leaving is just the beginning. Spain and Italy have shadow economies of between 30-50% the real economy. They can’t do without that. They can’t even get these boys to take a few hundred thousand Africans. Brussels will have to wind its neck in sooner rather than later.

HappyAsLarE

Graces7 wrote: »

No. Our Post Office closed years ago and we have no island Postal Agent so we rely on the nearest mainland town Post Office. Trust me! He takes the outgoing if I leave it out for him but is only here at most 3 times a week, usually 2. Often cut off in winter.
You mean WHERE is here? small offshore island. Excellent service given the circumstances.

Ah, their obligation is likely for mainland addresses only.

Irish Guitarist

In my experience the post office is far more reliable than any courier company. If I'm not in when the postman calls with a parcel he leaves a note telling me I missed a parcel and I go to collect it. With the majority of couriers if I miss them then tough shit. Very few of them make any effort to tell me they called.

Then there was the time I ordered almost €100 worth of CDs from Amazon US. They flew from California to London, then to Dublin and finally to my house in Carlow where a courier knocked on my door. I answered the door to him to witness him drop the CDs on the ground where the cases broke in pieces. He said "I'll write here that the envelope was open" and made a note. He said nothing about them breaking in shite though. My mother was in hospital at the time so I had too much on my mind to start complaining.

Edgware

Irish Guitarist wrote: »

In my experience the post office is far more reliable than any courier company. If I'm not in when the postman calls with a parcel he leaves a note telling me I missed a parcel and I go to collect it. With the majority of couriers if I miss them then tough shit. Very few of them make any effort to tell me they called.

Then there was the time I ordered almost €100 worth of CDs from Amazon US. They flew from California to London, then to Dublin and finally to my house in Carlow where a courier knocked on my door. I answered the door to him to witness him drop the CDs on the ground where the cases broke in pieces. He said "I'll write here that the envelope was open" and made a note. He said nothing about them breaking in shite though. My mother was in hospital at the time so I had too much on my mind to start complaining.

The courier will only ring once but as you know the postman always rings twice

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

HappyAsLarE wrote: »

Ah, their obligation is likely for mainland addresses only.

It is indeed.

We need to focus on the needs of most people when it comes to a postal service. Do we need a proliferation of small post offices doing little business? No. Do we all really need a daily post delivery? Probably not in many areas. I get a lot of post between buying online, and general correspondence but it wouldn't be the end of the world if this lowly populated rural area had post delivered three days a week instead of five.

suicide_circus

could An Post do a corporate merger with The Catholic Church? Both are suffering from falling attendances. There's a church in every village. Collect salvation and your pension at the same time.

Guy:Incognito

Graces7 wrote: »

No. Our Post Office closed years ago and we have no island Postal Agent so we rely on the nearest mainland town Post Office. Trust me! He takes the outgoing if I leave it out for him but is only here at most 3 times a week, usually 2. Often cut off in winter.
You mean WHERE is here? small offshore island. Excellent service given the circumstances.

You say you live on a small island with 3 or 4 houses. Yet you also say couriers can't find you. That sounds like the easiest place in the world to find and deliver to unless it's an unanchored pontoon floating about.

Guy:Incognito

Cee-Jay-Cee wrote: »

I buy 90% of everything online and I would estimate that 75% of those deliveries are by AnPost. In my opinion they are more efficient and quicker than couriers.

That's not really a case for keeping the local post office open with staff behind a counter every day.

Mal-Adjusted

Deleted User wrote: »

Never understand why driving licenses can't be got in the post office like you can do in the UK. But it being Ireland we had to create a whole new level of bureaucracy with these NDLR test centres. Would have been some handy business for the post offices instead.

Sorry for going off topic here but this is something that really irks me. Here in Galway, the Theory test centre, NDLS centre and actual driving test centre are in three offices, in three different buildings far apart. One is in the middle of town, one is out in Westside and another is up in Ballybrit. There is no reason why they shouldn't all be under the one roof and shows the utter lack of planning that goes on here!

mikemac2

Is the An Post depot still out on the Tuam road?

It’s a looooong walk out there to get a package. No buses out there at all. Well not when I lived there

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

mikemac2 wrote: »

Is the An Post depot still out on the Tuam road?

It’s a looooong walk out there to get a package. No buses out there at all. Well not when I lived there

We need to do something. Are there no cars or bicycles? 15km+ here to the depot and no public transport but we manage just fine.

bk

So when we talk about postal services, there are really three different main business here:

- Parcel Delivery, it is up big time for An Post and they make a lot of money from it. For me, deliveries that come from my post man or local An Post courier driver are excellent, better then most of the third party couriers. Fasway and DPD are decent, UPS are a fecking disaster.

Though I do think AP needs to do better with new services and technology. They really should have rolled out a proper competitor to Parcel Motel, with actual lockers and not the shocking AddressPal service, like Deustsche Post did very successfully in Germany.

Also they need to get their act together with tracking, organising re-deliveries, holding packages etc. like DPD's excellent system and the texts they send need a one hour time slot and the actual tracking number!

Post - This has fallen off the cliff and will likely continue to only get worse with the recent big price increase for the cost of a stamp from 70c to €1. I suspect we will start to see deliveries only every second day like some other countries have and eventually maybe just once a week.

Personally, I live in an apartment and thus my letter box is at the other end of the building. For the last 10 years I've only checked it about once a week and it has never been an issue. Mostly it is just spam anyway.

Post Offices - The services they offer are way down with people swapping to online means and they are increasingly unprofitable.

Rather then fighting to keep your local rural Post Office open, which is very unlikely to work, I'd campaign for AP to follow what the Royal Mail did in the UK, where they allowed local shops to start offering all postal services. This both saved the postal service and helped keep the shops open too.

Note, I don't mean a separate post office, with a separate post master inside a shop as is quite common in Ireland already. This requires two staff, even if quiet. No I mean they have the shop keeper also be the post master. So you can both buy a bottle of milk and send a letter/get your pension from the shopkeeper.

And it actually has one big advantage, opening time. My local post office is in a shop, but stupidly it opens at the usual stupid post office hours, 9 to 5 and closes at lunch, so absolutely useless for anyone with a job. Yet the shop it is in, is open from 7am in the morning to 11pm at night! Yet I can't do postal services, send a package etc. Very stupid.

In the UK, with this setup, you can do postal services at any time the shop happens to be open, much better.

There is no reason why you couldn't do all the following at your local shop:
- Buy stamps
- Send and receive letters and packages.
- Get your pension
- Pay bills
- Do banking through the "post office" with AIB and Ulster Bank, etc.

Many local shops already do many of these sort of services with Payzone and DPD ParcelWizard. No reason why they couldn't do the same for An Post services and it helps boost your small local shops business.

stoneill

Is there such thing as a mobile post office, similar to a mobile library.
Monday - Ballymagash, Tuesday - Culchietown, Wednesday - Rathwilly, and so on.

BarryD2

Cabaal wrote: »

The postal system will of course survive, with so much services moving online people still need physical items delivered and somebody has to do this.

However, local post offices is another matter and people need to think long and hard about the importance of them in their community (and they are important social hubs) especially for older people.

There are two sides to the supply/ delivery chain.

1) An Post delivering all the stuff people are ordering online. This is their great hope.

2) businesses and sellers that sell goods online and put them into the An Post delivery system.

You can't have one without the other. Meanwhile An Post are busy closing down the points where rural businesses and sellers can put goods into their system and pay them.

One government dept is trying to roll out broadband to rural areas to facilitate rural businesses, among other needs. Whilst another is closing down the portals of the delivery services where many of these same businesses might use to deliver their goods.

Stupid or just plain stupid?

BarryD2

stoneill wrote: »

Is there such thing as a mobile post office, similar to a mobile library.
Monday - Ballymagash, Tuesday - Culchietown, Wednesday - Rathwilly, and so on.

We had a post office close near us, frankly there wasn't enough business for a 5½ day week. It wasn't getting enough support from local people as they had less and less need to use it. However there was still a local need, we used it regularly to send out packets, parcels and letters as did a couple of other local businesses. There were also local pensioners etc., well served by the office.

There was community interest in keeping this PO open but it didn't make sense as a full time job. What would have suited admirably were reduced opening hours. Two hours a day, Mon-Fri would have been manageable and more than adequate. Regular customers could have easily worked around that.

An Post refused. It was all or nothing with them. They wanted to force closure by making the service unworkable.

bk

BarryD2 wrote: »

There are two sides to the supply/ delivery chain.

1) An Post delivering all the stuff people are ordering online. This is their great hope.

2) businesses and sellers that sell goods online and put them into the An Post delivery system.

You can't have one without the other. Meanwhile An Post are busy closing down the points where rural businesses and sellers can put goods into their system and pay them.

But you don't need small rural business for the first. In fact you would be likely much more profitable without those rural post offices.

The reality is that the vast majority of parcels arrive in multiple large artic trucks from Amazon and other major retailers warehouses into the An Post parcel depot every night.

Parcels for rural business probably make up 1% of all the parcels they handle and likely cost them far more to handle then that sweet Amazon, ebay, etc. business.

So no it isn't stupid, the most profitable thing for AP to do would be to close all rural post offices, end mail delivery and just focus on these parcel deliveries instead.

Having said that, I don't think they will go that far. They are a semi state and they do have certain services they are required to offer.

However there is no need in particular to have many post offices. There is no reason why rural business can't deliver the parcels into the small shop in the same village now acting as a post office, what difference would that make?

Or perhaps if An Post was to roll out ParcelMotel type lockers instead. You could now drop off your parcel 24/7, much nicer then a post office IMO.

There are plenty of ways of making post and parcel services more efficient to run and maintain service.

bk

BarryD2 wrote: »

An Post refused. It was all or nothing with them. They wanted to force closure by making the service unworkable.

What you suggested to them is a good idea, but I suspect the issue for them was that most post offices aren't owned by them. They are mostly franchises run by the "post master". AP don't own the actual building, so they likely couldn't negotiate with your local post master to leave them use it just for two hours a day.

I'd say most postmasters would rather be forced into early retirement or redundancy payment rather then operate for just two hours a day, understandably.

Perhaps a more workable option would have been a Parcelmotel type locker or even a large parcel drop locker that the local postman empties everyday.

Even better would be to get postal services transferred to your closest shop.

Feisar

Mrs OBumble wrote: »

How many letters have you posted recently, caller?

Well I recently posted 150 letters.

Thinly veiled I got married.

BarryD2

bk wrote: »

However there is no need in particular to have many post offices. There is no reason why rural business can't deliver the parcels into the small shop in the same village now acting as a post office, what difference would that make?

Or perhaps if An Post was to roll out ParcelMotel type lockers instead. You could now drop off your parcel 24/7, much nicer then a post office IMO.

There are plenty of ways of making post and parcel services more efficient to run and maintain service.

Agree entirely, that sort of arrangement would work well. I don't believe though that An Post management are capable of thinking up such a scheme, never mind delivering on it. Like most state/ semi state bodies, they seem to have a fixed mindset - 'this is how the service has always been run and that's the way it'll always be'

Guy:Incognito

BarryD2 wrote: »

There are two sides to the supply/ delivery chain.

1) An Post delivering all the stuff people are ordering online. This is their great hope.

2) businesses and sellers that sell goods online and put them into the An Post delivery system.

You can't have one without the other. Meanwhile An Post are busy closing down the points where rural businesses and sellers can put goods into their system and pay them.

One government dept is trying to roll out broadband to rural areas to facilitate rural businesses, among other needs. Whilst another is closing down the portals of the delivery services where many of these same businesses might use to deliver their goods.

Stupid or just plain stupid?

Close the post offices, saving money. Use said money to operate a system of collecting goods from these businesses. If there are enough of them to keep all the post offices going then ap will make a fortune surely? Plus, what business wouldn't want the parcels collected rather than humping them down to the po?

Guy:Incognito

BarryD2 wrote: »

We had a post office close near us, frankly there wasn't enough business for a 5½ day week. It wasn't getting enough support from local people as they had less and less need to use it. However there was still a local need, we used it regularly to send out packets, parcels and letters as did a couple of other local businesses. There were also local pensioners etc., well served by the office.

There was community interest in keeping this PO open but it didn't make sense as a full time job. What would have suited admirably were reduced opening hours. Two hours a day, Mon-Fri would have been manageable and more than adequate. Regular customers could have easily worked around that.

An Post refused. It was all or nothing with them. They wanted to force closure by making the service unworkable.

Youd have to pay someone to come in to work for 2 hours a day. You may well get luck and get someone that wants to work 10 hours a week spread over 5 days but I can't imagine they'd be queueing for it. If there's a definition of someone better off on the dole, that's them. Plus you still have all the associated costs of running the building, even if it's sits idle the majority of the time.

zell12

AnPost advert. In fairness, they provide an excellent service for what it costs.