There was a post from someone called Suitone,one of the best I have read,here it is,whoever wrote it knows the score.
If you need something to arrive the next day why not allow companies to compete to send your mail. It works very well for large parcels. Let the Royal Mail do standard deliveries 3 times a week.''
It's an industry mate. 77,000,000 items of mail can move through the delivery system in every 24 hours.
That letter addressed to you is one out of millions.
What Channel 4 showed last night, one of the competitors to Royal Mail shuffling a few letters around, is a joke.
An industry, no different from any other industry. A customer wants 1,000,000 letters delivered to 1,000,000 individuals living at 1,000,000 individual addresses around the UK. How is that mail to be delivered?
Does the customer come to Royal Mail 1,000,000 times? Of course not. How are 1,000,000 letters printed? How are 1,000,000 letters pit into envelopes? How are 1,000,000 letters in envelopes taken from the printers to the post office?
An industry. Royal Mail is the conduit for the British printing industry. If Royal Mail goes, so does the printing industry.
The printing of 1,000,000 letters and envelopes is a production line. The production line prints the letters, puts the letters into envelopes, stacks the envelopes into bundles of 10s to 100s. Bundles are then placed into mail bags.
1,000,000 letters have to be divided into smaller units. The units are determined by address. Mail bags are filled with envelopes going to the same post codes. The mail bags are lifted and placed in heavy metal cages. Each cage, when full, weighs 750 kilos. A mailbag weighs 10 kilo.
To move the cages filled with mailbags from the printers, a 40 tonne Royal Mail Artic arrives. The cages are driven onto the back and strapped. The driver then drives the cages to a distribution centre. Sometimes the driver has to wait for hours to get unloaded because of the volume of traffic being taken on and off.
The cages are stacked by fork truck. Four cages high. Lines and lines of cages, each weighing, when full, 750 kilo.
Channel 4 showed a guy shuffling letters around. At one Royal Mail distribution centre the accident rates resulting from the volume of the traffic, the congestion, the demands of deadlines that had to be met to keep the business going, the proximity of people working, the constant movement of mechanical equipment shifting cages of mail, each cage weighing when full 750 kilos, so that deadlines could be met, meant the Royal Mail Health & Safety manager had to inform staff the statistical probability was that the next accident in the building could be a fatality - a fatality not as a consequence of your single letter, not as a consequence of the 1,000,000 letters one specific customer had sent, but as a consequence of the changes in production line from 1990 onwards resulting in a daily Royal Mail pipeline traffic, every day, of 75,000,000 to 77,000,000 items, the individual letters, each weighing a few grams, placed in sacks of mail weighing on average 10 kilos each, the sacks placed in metal cages, the metal cages weighing 750 kilos when full stacked four high, line after line of cages stacked four high, people working in the vicinity of the lines of stacked cages, new cages coming into the building, cages leaving the building.
When one day is finished, the next starts. More cages. More lines of cages each weighing 750 kilos when full. Lines of mail. Finish that day, the next day starts. More lines.
Process the bags in the cages so that the mailbags can be sent to the next stage in the Royal Mail pipeline that will get your individual letter landing on your doorstep, a postie, working at one bag a minute, bends, lifts, carries, drops, 17.5 tonnes of weight in a week.
17.5 tonnes of weight. Channel 4 showed a man moving a handful of letters from the counter to a tray in the back a few yards away. How many grammes did he move?
The posties adapted to the demands of the market so well the printing houses of Yorkshire not only became the biggest in the UK, they could hire agency staff by the coachload to do the lifting. What the posties never got was justice.
A cut of the profits.
