Royal mail: change for change sake

[Geezer]

http://www.mydigitalfc.com/leisure-writ ... e-sake-398

Aug 25 2009 18:23 hrs IST , London, International Herald Tribune


By Alice Rawsthorn

LONDON — Strikes. Disappearing letters. Shuttered post offices. Irritatingly long queues and suspicious smells in the survivors. There are (sadly) lots of reasons for the British to indulge in the popular national pastime of grumbling about the Royal Mail this summer.
The appearance last week of a new series of Royal Mail stamps to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the postbox should have struck a cheerier tone. Even the grouchiest grumblers agree that old-fashioned mailboxes are among the most popular symbols of Britain, and share many characteristics of the country’s other design icons.
One is that they come in a rousing shade of red, like the K2 telephone kiosk and Routemaster double-decker bus. Another is that they have the gutsy, no-nonsense engineering aesthetic of the K2, Routemaster and other national design gems, including the Concorde and Spitfire fighter jet. (The French tend to favour elegant icons, like the delicate Art Nouveau ironwork of the Paris subway and those dainty blue and white enamel street signs, but the pretension-phobic British prefer theirs to look pragmatic.) And like so many other jewels of Britain’s design heritage, the postbox is not what it used to be.
In fairness to the Royal Mail (not that I feel like doing it any favours in light of its other recent offenses), the design standards of mailboxes have not plunged quite as precipitously as those of phone booths and buses. The latest designs are unforgivably mediocre, but are neither as ugly as the shabby vandal-magnets that now pass for telephone kiosks, nor as dysfunctional as the lethally long “bendy buses,” which were imported to Britain from Germany to become objects of national hatred, alongside tax inspectors and bonus-grabbing bankers. Why have so many British design treasures been so badly neglected?
There are some boringly obvious logistical reasons. The “change for change’s sake” syndrome among ambitious executives in an era of ever-decreasing corporate life expectancy makes them feel compelled to meddle with perfectly good designs to make an impact or, better still (in their eyes, at least), to replace them with something new. They then bungle the process of making modifications or choosing replacements by dint of any or all of the following: cowardice, laziness, lack of imagination, delegating decision-making to committees or focus groups (even though the result is bound to be compromised) and plain ineptitude.
None of these problems are limited to public design projects. They are routine corporate crimes that bedevil every area of design, and explain why we end up with other disasters, like inoperable cellphones, illegible instruction manuals, neurotically overstyled espresso machines and landfill sites bloated with indestructible, non-biodegradable rubbish.
All of this could, of course, be avoided, if the designers, and the people who commission them, were better equipped to do their jobs. Throughout design history, almost every national design coup was initiated by a stellar patron, not just in Britain, but other countries, too. Take Frank Pick, who made London Transport a model of modern design management in the early 1900s. Many of his innovations, like Harry Beck’s 1933 diagrammatic London Underground map and Edward Johnston’s 1916 roundel symbol, are still in use today. Pick oversaw everything, traveling around the network on rare ‘nights off’ to check that it was perfect. Even the Routemaster, which was commissioned after his retirement, owes much to his legacy.

[F0zziebear]

Hold on a minute. Now I'm as nostalgic and sentimental as the next person, but she is missing some points here:

1. The old routemaster was unreliable, dangerous and inaccessible to the disabled, frail, and those with pushcairs and young children. Now the bendy bus was a disaster waiting to happen. New designs for an old style routemaster are going through at the moment and they will return to London's streets. Oh I also forgot how smelly, fuel inefficient and bad for the environment they were. I still loved riding them when I could though.

2. Postboxes. I love looking at them around the country. Why? They tell you much about an area. When it was developed, levels of grafitti etc. and are another part of Britain, but most are rarely used now. Most mail enters the system via DSA or directly from print houses. These postboxes are expensive to empty daily. If you are running a business as is the case with RM as the government has deemed it to be, then you have to work out ways to make a return on the investment put in. I'm not going to go into detail here about it, but common sense tells you that many a rural postbox is expensive to empty considering the volumes that are in there. However, they are a social treasure. So keep them, even if they're not emptied anymore. Put a stopper in them and keep them maintained. Alternatively accept them as a burden on the taxpayer and keep them.

The problem is that we both want to keep them but complain when we have to pay to keep them going from the public purse. Society has to make up its mind on this. It's unfair on RM as they are attempting to keep the company in profit.

[pickaname]

Hold on a minute. Now I'm as nostalgic and sentimental as the next person, but she is missing some points here:

1. The old routemaster was unreliable, dangerous and inaccessible to the disabled, frail, and those with pushcairs and young children. Now the bendy bus was a disaster waiting to happen. New designs for an old style routemaster are going through at the moment and they will return to London's streets. Oh I also forgot how smelly, fuel inefficient and bad for the environment they were. I still loved riding them when I could though.

2. Postboxes. I love looking at them around the country. Why? They tell you much about an area. When it was developed, levels of grafitti etc. and are another part of Britain, but most are rarely used now. Most mail enters the system via DSA or directly from print houses. These postboxes are expensive to empty daily. If you are running a business as is the case with RM as the government has deemed it to be, then you have to work out ways to make a return on the investment put in. I'm not going to go into detail here about it, but common sense tells you that many a rural postbox is expensive to empty considering the volumes that are in there. However, they are a social treasure. So keep them, even if they're not emptied anymore. Put a stopper in them and keep them maintained. Alternatively accept them as a burden on the taxpayer and keep them.

The problem is that we both want to keep them but complain when we have to pay to keep them going from the public purse. Society has to make up its mind on this. It's unfair on RM as they are attempting to keep the company in profit.

How does the public purse pay for postboxes? The letters that are put in them pay for them and bulk mailings subsidie it to a point. Collections are a service...yes a service. Remember what that is?

This post has to be the biggest load of nonsense ive ever read on this board. An argument for the removal of Post Boxes...sorry in advance for being so frank - ive heard some sh*t in my time but this is beyond idiocy.

Utter tosh.

[F0zziebear]

Maybe I need to clarify what I'm saying, and then you can reaffirm or change your opinion. If you take purely the cost of emptying some of these postboxes in terms of the revenue it provides it is not good business sense.

You are completely right to point out that these postboxes are subsidised by products such as MailSort etc. which provide the main underlying volume for RM. If RM is making a profit as a whole then one could argue to keep these postboxes as a loss leader because they provide a service that helps inbed the brand of RM in the community and makes people feel happy about using RM. Now this may sounds like bollox but this is the mindset of those who work in marketing and do all that research into behavioural studies etc.

If however, RM is not making much money or is losing money, or is likely to be losing money in near and medium term, then you start to look at all of your products and services and see which ones to cut, and what new products and services can be introduced to maintain revenues or generate new sources of revenue. Now postboxes, espcially those in rural areas are expensive to run if you isolated the cost of emptying them (drive, van, petrol, uniform, HR, Finance and all sorts of other things) versus the revenue they generate then you would look to remove them.

The same can be said for bicycles, and it seems that your friends in HQ (your colleagues by the way as you usually slag them off) have deemed that there is a commercially better way of providing this service.

It does not mean you agree with it. I fully accept that. In my previous post I was pointing out that that there is a difference between commcerical and social decision making. I was arguing that on a commercial level you could remove these postboxes, but maybe they should be kept on a social level. Now if RM is in the red (including the pension deficit) then it is us the taxpayer who indirectly or otherwise subsidises these postboxes. If it still does not make sense to you and think it is bollox, then you are entitled to your opinion.

F0zz

[BELIAL]

Good points Fozz ,and totally agree , But to daw an artificial divide between business mailings and customer response is to say the least,disingenuous .
Of course business mailouts will far outnumber solicited response volumes ,thats the nature of the beast . Take either one away, and the other ceases to exist.Me ,I dont care .but revenue and profit all goes one way ,and heres a hint, the customer never gains

[F0zziebear]

I agree with you regarding cross-subsidisation. There were all sorts of cross-subsidies going to the Post Office for many years, whcih made the PO perofrm better than it actually was. There was also some of this a long time ago with ParcelForce. Most of this is now seperated, which enables RM (Govt.) to sell them off as individual concerns.

As for removing postboxes, rural DOs, MCs, bicycles and other things they are decided upon as a seperate cost to revenue benefit. I am only explaining how some decisions are made.

[BELIAL]

I agree with you regarding cross-subsidisation. There were all sorts of cross-subsidies going to the Post Office for many years, whcih made the PO perofrm better than it actually was. There was also some of this a long time ago with ParcelForce. Most of this is now seperated, which enables RM (Govt.) to sell them off as individual concerns.

As for removing postboxes, rural DOs, MCs, bicycles and other things they are decided upon as a seperate cost to revenue benefit. I am only explaining how some decisions are made.

No problem Fozz I like your posts . As you say ,it's how decisions are made. Nothing personal I just question the assumptions on which those decisions are based.
Bye the bye it's quite refreshing to exchange views with someone capable of independent thought who doesn't need to bully people to plump up his paypacket

[andy2007]

Personally, I think there are two completely seperate (except in emotional terms) issues brought up in the article:
1) The Mailboxes are a classic design, which should be preserved, as part of our Heritage.
2) Mailboxes of some kind, need to be maintained. Or people will have trouble geting their Mail into the system. Particularly in Rural Areas.

Now, as Fozzie said: If we simply want to maintain the Mailboxes. Then seal them up, and preserve them for their own sake. There's an old wall mounted one, a few miles from me, which was sealed up, years ago. They now have a modern one, on a pole, in a more convenient location (same side of the busy road, as the majority of houses). But the same principle could be used, simply to replace any old ones that are no longer viable, to keep in service. But think of the initial cost, of installing all those new Mailboxes. Surely the maintenance costs of the old Mailboxes, can't be that high, can it?

Now, if on the other hand. They're seriously suggesting (as Fozzie did) that they should remove (particularly Rural) Mailboxes completely. To reduce the cost of emptying them. Then they really haven't thought this through. We now have many Rural areas, with no Post Office, for miles. Even in Towns/Cities, they're often so far away, that it's not practical to walk to it. Although personally, I've been lucky so far. I still have 3 in easy walking distance (God knows how we've escaped the cull so far. But long may we continue to escape it!), so it isn't a problem for me. But I know of many other areas, where they've lost theirs.

So if there's no Post Office, within practical walking distance. Either because you can't get there and back in your Dinner Break. Or because you're unable to walk that far, because you're not as mobile as you once were. Then how on Earth, are you supposed to post a letter?

Haven't they considered reducing the number of collections per day that the less well used ones have?
It is possible to just empty the busy ones at one point (some are still very well used). Then empty all of them later. I know I'm oversimplifying here. But I'm just trying to make a point.

[baldrick]

Haven't they considered reducing the number of collections per day that the less well used ones have?
It is possible to just empty the busy ones at one point (some are still very well used). Then empty all of them later.

RM are already doing that. Apart from the Central London most of the rest of London only
get one collection at the end of the day - 6.30pm where I live. 12.30 on Saturday

[andy2007]

Would I be right in thinking that some of them are full to bursting, by the time they're emptied?

I still believe that everyone should have a Mailbox within walking distance of their Home. The USO is there for a reason. It MUST be maintained at all costs! We mustn't allow anyone to remove access to it, from those who can't drive, and/or don't have regular Public Transport (e.g. Rural areas)!

[F0zziebear]

Buldrick is right that many have gone from 2 to 1 collection as the USO states that they should be cleared a minimum of once a day. It's funny what people think the USO includes and what it actually specifically asks RM to do. In the past RM did more than the minimum.

Some boxes do overfill. To my mind it would have been great if there was a weight sensor in the boxes that sent a message to depot what it was full. I suppose this would be too expensive to implement, but a nice idea. Alternatively the drive when scanning the barcode could scan one saying empty, half or full. RM could then build up stats on when it is full and on what days. This could help improve routing. Just a thought. Not sure how many seconds that would add onto the round and all the negotiations to bring something like that in. Be good to try it in a few areas 'hot housing,' the idea in management speak.

F0zz

[andy2007]

Sorry, I didn't realise that there was only a requirement to empty them once a day. I thought that everyone was entitled to somewhere to post their Mail, wherever they live. So if the Mailbox was regularly overflowing, it wouldn't be sufficient. I stand corrected!