Nationalisation

[south London postie]

Worse case scenario in 10-20 years amazon buys Royal Mail. They could potentially do that right?

Surely they would be for more interested in UPS or one of the parcel delivery operations. Atm, Amazon use self-employed, £1 a drop people who supply their own transportation. Brilliantly low overheads for Amazon - gig economy, etc. God help you if you're sick.

[postmanzach]

Worse case scenario in 10-20 years amazon buys Royal Mail. They could potentially do that right?

Surely they would be for more interested in UPS or one of the parcel delivery operations. Atm, Amazon use self-employed, £1 a drop people who supply their own transportation. Brilliantly low overheads for Amazon - gig economy, etc. God help you if you're sick.

Ah right yeah was just an idea, a silly one at that. I heard about them (amazon delivery people) but don’t have any down here, we do nearly all of amazon parcels. Be pretty light without them. Think because there’s too much rural area here they wouldn’t make much, getting paid per item delivered. Though Dpd do some of the prime stuff royalMail currently can’t do.

Back on topic, IF Corbyn did win and he wanted to nationalise, would the government have to buy all our shares of us? What if we didn’t want to to sell them? How does it work?

[SpacePhoenix]

Near enough all I buy from Amazon that's either sold by them or fulfilled by them gets sent via Yodel/Amazon's own delivery company. Ocassionaly DPD. It's going to be interesting to see if the amount of stuff that Amazon sends via RM changes at all with the increase in weight limit of Tracked and LAT. I can see RM introducing another time at some point for SDs in addition to the current times for LAT say 15:00 or 16:00

[fosal29]

Not really an answer but there current ways of prioritising costs over quality can’t carry on. So much mail fails and will continue to fail they need to change something.

Posted this on a different thread but well worth a read. Part of a paper written by the Bow Group in 2013.

So how exactly can a new owner extract greater value from Royal Mail? The simple answer
is to reduce the services that are non-profitable.
Conveniently the government has carried legislation allowing a new owner to do just that.
The 2011 Postal Services Act allows Ministers to create a special administrative regime to
maintain the universal service obligation. It is highly probably that after a few years, a buyer
will conclude that it can no longer fulfill its legal requirement to undertake its legal
obligations. It will then simply transfer the rump of its non-profitable business back onto
the tax-payer, taking with it the highly profitable urban letter and parcels traffic.
In response the regulator will be tasked with ensuring some form of letter delivery in rural
areas is maintained. Its first act will be to reduce the requirements of the universal service, at
a stroke cutting deliveries to rural areas to possibly two or three days a week.
Ofcom will then in turn have to tender contracts on a regional basis to deliver the universal
service obligation with significant taxpayer subsidy. Royal Mail, having exited this particular
market will not want to tender. Rather it would give up elements of its rural infrastructure to
the new operators. A regional network of smaller state subsidised postal operators will then
emerged to undertake to maintain the less onerous requirements set by the regulator.
So over a period a time, Royal Mail will go from a state owned, financial success story to a
privately owned business shorn of any obligations to deliver mail where it does not want to.

[RTP]

As a newsish stater and no idea what is was like before, what would this mean for RM?

What was it like before?

I'll start with these.

The wages weren't as good as they are now, but the pension was a lot better.

If new builds came into the area, then extra hours would be given to the office to allow for them. Guaranteed.