Royal Mail
Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that the royal mail are doing things totally ass-backwards. They're loosing money and struggling and keep putting up prices and seem to be generally fighting against the inevitable. Since the government decided to allow competition in the postal service, so that other companies can undercut them to deliver your mail for 99% of the journey, while then still requiring RM to do the most expensive part - last mile, it's gotten worse. The postal service as we once knew it is to all intents and purposes dead, for virtually all correspondence now, we have email, it's very rare that correspondence need to be sent by post, most bills are now delivered electronically, as they should be, it's greener. But in our modern, online world, we still need to move physical items around, no one has yet invented star trek style Heisenberg compensators yet, so we don't have matter transporters. And frankly in this country, our physical infrastructure is a joke, considering how small and how dense a population we have compared to most other nations, the fact that it can cost someone a week's wages to drive from one end of the country to the other, that you have to sell a kidney to afford a ticket on one of our slow and ageing train, I mean the tax on fuel is murder on the haulage industry, but that's another rant.
Royal mail need to adapt to this new world, but what they're doing is closing more and more post offices.
WHY?!
They should open MOAR post offices, tons of them all over the place, even more than there used to be, you continue to offer all the additional little services that post offices are handy for, but your primary focus is as a delivery and collection office, and set long opening hours 7am - 9pm. And then... Make last mile delivery a premium service! How many of us would care about not having the post coming to our doors any more? For how many people would it be just as easy to swing by the post office on the way to or the way from work, picking up the kids, the supermarket, walking the dog, whatever? It could even give you a reason to get out of the house for 5 minutes. If you can't get there for some reason you could give the neighbour kid half a shilling to go get it for you. Or if you want, you have the option of paying a fee to have your mail delivered to you, either every day, or less frequently, at a time to suit you, just like you can with your groceries.
You provide an online portal and a smartphone app to let you know when you having something waiting for you, whether it's a letter or a parcel, and some information as to where it came from. (maybe a digital scan / photo of each item) And you let the customer nominate which post office to have his mail sent to (because the most convenient isn't always the closest to your home).
You certainly wouldn't have to go pick up stuff every day, how often now do you not receive any post at all? or more likely the only post you receive that day is junk mail?
And in cases where it's important something get to someone quickly, the sender can choose to pay an additional fee to have something sent directly to the recipient's house. But for anything not super important you might even be able to drop the price of posting from where it currently is.
And as far as mandated competition is concerned, other companies would also be able to stick stuff in your box, (they'd pay whatever license fee to RM for doing so)
This isn't a new concept, you can buy stuff from tesco direct and have it delivered free to a store of your choice, and Amazon have started opening collection centres in some places. Royal Mail already have a big advantage in already having a large number of convenient, physical locations, I believe the industry will go this way anyway. If RM don't adapt, they'll become a dinosaur, they'll either get prohibitively expensive, or they'll just go out of business. Even now, I suspect they only survive on the money that delivering junk mail earns them, and junk mail is bad for the environment, if I were in the government I'd be levying a tax on it. Corporate mail is going to continue to decline, you can sign up for a direct debit online, you can even get your TV license emailed to you, and the only time I get a paper bank statement is if I'm in my overdraft.
So yeah, Royal Mail, in other words...
TL;DR
YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!
Royal mail need to adapt to this new world, but what they're doing is closing more and more post offices.
WHY?!
They should open MOAR post offices, tons of them all over the place, even more than there used to be, you continue to offer all the additional little services that post offices are handy for, but your primary focus is as a delivery and collection office, and set long opening hours 7am - 9pm. And then... Make last mile delivery a premium service! How many of us would care about not having the post coming to our doors any more? For how many people would it be just as easy to swing by the post office on the way to or the way from work, picking up the kids, the supermarket, walking the dog, whatever? It could even give you a reason to get out of the house for 5 minutes. If you can't get there for some reason you could give the neighbour kid half a shilling to go get it for you. Or if you want, you have the option of paying a fee to have your mail delivered to you, either every day, or less frequently, at a time to suit you, just like you can with your groceries.
You provide an online portal and a smartphone app to let you know when you having something waiting for you, whether it's a letter or a parcel, and some information as to where it came from. (maybe a digital scan / photo of each item) And you let the customer nominate which post office to have his mail sent to (because the most convenient isn't always the closest to your home).
You certainly wouldn't have to go pick up stuff every day, how often now do you not receive any post at all? or more likely the only post you receive that day is junk mail?
And in cases where it's important something get to someone quickly, the sender can choose to pay an additional fee to have something sent directly to the recipient's house. But for anything not super important you might even be able to drop the price of posting from where it currently is.
And as far as mandated competition is concerned, other companies would also be able to stick stuff in your box, (they'd pay whatever license fee to RM for doing so)
This isn't a new concept, you can buy stuff from tesco direct and have it delivered free to a store of your choice, and Amazon have started opening collection centres in some places. Royal Mail already have a big advantage in already having a large number of convenient, physical locations, I believe the industry will go this way anyway. If RM don't adapt, they'll become a dinosaur, they'll either get prohibitively expensive, or they'll just go out of business. Even now, I suspect they only survive on the money that delivering junk mail earns them, and junk mail is bad for the environment, if I were in the government I'd be levying a tax on it. Corporate mail is going to continue to decline, you can sign up for a direct debit online, you can even get your TV license emailed to you, and the only time I get a paper bank statement is if I'm in my overdraft.
So yeah, Royal Mail, in other words...
TL;DR
YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!
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