Post Office woes
DCO Opinion
What is it with the modern Post Office? Why does it try so hard to compete with flashy private companies when most of us preferred the shabby, slightly shambolic, but dedicated, and mostly reliable, older version?
Take Exeter’s central post office, now part of the Princesshay shopping and leisure complex.
Inexplicably, it has converted itself into a kind of airport terminal, with bucket seats, four kinds of ticket to queue up for even before you wait your turn, and ceaseless announcements of ticket numbers and letters of the alphabet.
Not surprisingly, elderly people, who use it most, seem rather bemused with the whole set-up. They may well exclaim, “I only came in a for a stamp, not to fly to Malaga.”
However, try to avoid the airport experience and you’ll find almost all the comfortingly familiar sub-post offices have been closed down.
Over decades, governments have feather-bedded them with subsidies but are now withdrawing from the marketplace at the speed of a scalded hand.
Such is the chaos at the new model Heathrow-style Post Office, I predict we won’t have any at all within five to 20 years.
Meanwhile, down at the parcel office on the other side of town, beware of the PO Box scandal.
Here’s how it goes. If you don’t get many letters in your box — as is the case with many private users — your mail is deposited “upstairs”. When you go to collect it, the assistant gives you a weary look and disappears for 10 minutes or more, eventually returning only to tell you, “No mail” or hand you a circular.
At this point you may feel like apologising, but whooooa! You are paying the same as anyone else and using the service less. They should be thanking you. Instead you are treated like a minor nuisance.
If you ask why you are being shunted up into the “gods”, they will tell you there’s no room for you down on the ground floor.
This is outrageous because I once saw the pile of letters “upstairs” when someone brought them down out of exasperation. It was about three inches thick and held together with a rubber band.
Can you seriously tell me that a small space could not be found to keep them on the ground floor when, by commercial standards, their owners are the office’s best customers?
Bah, humbug!