Dire service from the Royal Mail

counter staff are very unhelpful

[Essex_boy]

maybe its me but Im finding that the counter staff in the Post offices to be unhelpful. They dread it when I show with an armful of parcels, Ive had comments to the effect, will often charge me for the wrong service i.e airmail instead of surface and in general are major break on the smooth running of my bsiness.

Anyone else have that problem is it just that I have several awful branches near me?

[Miop]

Mine love it when I go in - they are worried about being closed down, so the more the PO is used, the better!
I did demonstrate my embarrassment about holding up the queue, but was told to ignore them!

[Ivana]

Shouldn't you be able to get some sort of business service, where they pick up you parcels? The Royal Mail website appear to have several options.

[Michael Anthony]

Essex_Boy, you may have enough volume to ask the Royal Mail to collect from you on a daily basis. When I ran my own travel business we would regularly have 200-400 mail items daily, and we calculated that it cost us 2 man hours daily to frank it all and get it down to the PO.

There is a charge for the service, but in our case the extra 2 hours of this person's time that was freed up more than compensated for the cost.

Added - Ivana, great minds think alike!

[hannamyluv]

Hmm... Here in the US, the post office is renowned for the level of rudeness one can run into, not to mention the number of them that lose it, and "go postal" (actual american slang term) shooting a half dozen people with a weapon of some sort.

My local one has really nice people but there was one near were I use to work that I dreaded going to. They once called my office yelled at me and made me come back because I had left a full mail tub on the counter to be retrieved rather than taking all of the mail out of that mail tub, putting into the slot where it would then go into another exact same type mail tub. It was exactly 3 steps from the counter to the slot and at the time, I figured I was saving them the step as they wouldn't have to deal with an overflowing mail tub. Silly me.

[Essex_boy]

I too have several local branches facing the axe and assumed they'd be happy with extra volume.. But no all I get are sarky comments.

Today was the final straw when I asked for a parcel to go surface 3 (THREE) times and they charged me for airmail.

ARGGHHH

[andy_boyd]

I find that the Royal Mail offers a good enough service from my area, I usually use my local post office. However, it does feel like I make a big hassle when I need a couple of packages posted. I send a lot of stuff from the UK to USA / Canada, AirSure is an expensive thing when the package weighs over 1kg. Any ideas for a better alternative?

[Rubylily]

My local PO is also very worried about being closed down so they appreciate the business and have always been very helpful, but I know they used to groan when I turned up each day with armfuls of parcels. So I got myself a franking machine and now it's my favourite toy. It has made a huge difference to the way I do things. Now I just turn up at my PO everyday to simply drop the parcels off, and they love me for it.

[ish]

We have a daily collection from Royal Mail. All we have to do is stamp the parcels, and sort them into different bags according to destination and Recorded Delivery status.

They turn up daily at 5:30. No more queues :)

Phone [phone] for RM Business.