Where's all the work?

[LouBarlow]

Plenty of parcels but next to no letters. More than enough work to fill our day here. That said, we have already started with our relief parcel rounds for town deliveries, which does ease the burden somewhat.

[SpacePhoenix]

Plenty of parcels but next to no letters. More than enough work to fill our day here. That said, we have already started with our relief parcel rounds for town deliveries, which does ease the burden somewhat.

No sign of any sort of increase in letters locally yet. If anything they've dropped off a little over the last couple of weeks

[BenacreNick]

Chaos today, seemingly no room to put anything anywhere.

[Beanyjazz]

We're not collecting many letters from the postboxes, mid Nov 4/5 years ago they were all hammered Monday mornings, we even used to do reliefs on Sat (before main collection) and on Sunday. If letters were say 70/80p, the boxes would be absolutely rammed like they used to be.

But hey, better to sell 10 letters at £1.25 than 100 at £0.70! That's the genius of Royal Mail!

[taurus88]

Parcels are abysmal at the minute, but this is the lowest for mail volumes I’ve ever seen going into December.

[BenacreNick]

I think customers are ordering their parcels now, and the Christmas cards will follow a few days into December.

Don't worry, you will have plenty.

[sixfoottwo]

Letters down a bit, just the job because I can do 3 lots in one day that haven't gone the previous days

Shambolic stuff.

[Seymour Buts]

The decline in letters is stark. I'd be surprised if we had a 40% call rate today. Loads of parcels though. 1 paired walk had 345 tracked items between them.

[RTP]

Plenty of parcels but next to no letters. More than enough work to fill our day here. That said, we have already started with our relief parcel rounds for town deliveries, which does ease the burden somewhat.

Relief parcel rounds. Yeah I remember them Enjoy it while it lasts.

[nuklearpuppy]

Where’s all the Xmas cards?? Are folk really that naive not to know the managers are hiding them and other Mail to concentrate on the lucrative parcels? I mean , come on….

[Burghboy]

We haven't completed our duty, not once since mid September. Now we can't even complete one side, just too many pkts, we have to leave most of the mail in. Where's all the work?

The majority of our office hasn’t completed their delivery since the failed revision back in May/June, now it’s a complete s**t show with mail everywhere, we don’t even sort/prep the mail that’s coming in that day as we have everything that was cut off the day before.

[Kenfandango]

I think multiple things are happening at once:
Stamp prices have made sending bulk Christmas cards prohibitively expensive for some of the older folk, been told a few times that people are "only sending one or two cards this year."
The shocking service people have been given over the last few years has put people off. People aren't stupid; if their cards have taken 3+ weeks to get to their destination for the last 3+ years and RM has blamed everyone but themselves each time, customers will see little point in spending the extra money.
We seem to be undercutting most other couriers on the "oversized" packets, so we are getting hammered with those in addition to the overflow from other companies (who RM describe as our rivals when it suits them, then for about a quarter of the year we happily do their work for them as our infrastructure is different.)

Additionally at our DO we seem to get the work through later and later. Last 2 weeks we've had a delivery of 50+ Yorks of packets show up at 8.30-9.00am every day, and the mail hasn't been arriving until after 7 despite RM making us all show up 20 minutes early to stand and wait for it.

[LouBarlow]

Plenty of parcels but next to no letters. More than enough work to fill our day here. That said, we have already started with our relief parcel rounds for town deliveries, which does ease the burden somewhat.

Relief parcel rounds. Yeah I remember them Enjoy it while it lasts.

We’ve had them for years. Not sure why you would think they will suddenly disappear.

[RTP]

Plenty of parcels but next to no letters. More than enough work to fill our day here. That said, we have already started with our relief parcel rounds for town deliveries, which does ease the burden somewhat.

Relief parcel rounds. Yeah I remember them Enjoy it while it lasts.

We’ve had them for years. Not sure why you would think they will suddenly disappear.

So did we until last year. If your office does well it will eventually be targeted as future savings.

That's all..

[fly-catchers]

Just read this post and the first advert video I next saw on YouTube was from RM! Pretty well saying if you don't send a card this Christmas you are a loser!