£37.80 to deliver a birthday card is not a first-class optio

[Stormproof]

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IT ALL seemed so simple. Popping a birthday card in the post to a friend less than 60 miles away. But take Royal Mail out of the equation, and I was left with was a bill so high I could have taken a return train there and delivered the card in person. Twice.
If the Royal Mail does go on strike this week, it is not just businesses and those awaiting doom-laden letters from the gas company who will suffer. For any individual wishing to use snail mail, the costs are high. And, it seems, the smaller the package, the bigger the price.

On Thursday afternoon I looked at a number of courier options to see if they could help me post my birthday card from Glasgow to Edinburgh for the equivalent of a Royal Mail First Class delivery service, which would cost me 39p and deliver it the next day.

First up was UPS, one of the country's biggest couriers. They informed me that it would pick my card up at 5pm that day at an address in Glasgow, and have it delivered to an address in Edinburgh by 10.30am on Friday morning. Fantastic, I thought. All this would be guaranteed, I was informed, for £37.80.

According to Fil Adams-Mercer, chief executive of Parcels2Go.com, an online delivery service that provides the services of a range of firms including DHL, UPS, FedEx, sending anything smaller than 2kg is always going to result in a no-win situation for the sender.

"It's only Royal Mail that has got the scale. When they put five or ten envelopes through your letterbox that's worth £3, it's 30p each, they collate it together and can take the cost. The cheapest price we could do is you pay a £5 surcharge and then every single parcel after that is £3.99 up to 2kg," he said.

I logged on to Parcels2Go.com to see for myself. The cheapest option came from DHL. I could send my card for £3.99, plus VAT, plus an added £5 collection surcharge. But even though I would be paying upwards of £9, it wouldn't get there on Friday, promising only a "2-5 day service".

The next cheapest option was also DHL. This offered a delivery time of 24-72 hours, and tantalisingly promised that 90% were delivered the next day. For this I would pay £4.99 plus VAT. Oh, and a £10 collection surcharge.


A look at another website, interparcel.com, which also offers the services of different courier companies as well as its own service, promised to send my card, via interparcel, for £8.99 plus VAT to its destination by the end of the next working day.

In the end, I didn't post the card. After all, for that amount of money, wouldn't it be far nicer just to deliver it in person?

[ramone]

The article above is why the public should support us!! A cple of years ago a parent I knew needed to get his daughters judo licence to Northern Ireland for an event which she was taking part in the next day - (She was the airport in Leeds and had forgotten it) - The time was 4.00 pm when he called me to ask if Royal mail could get the licence to her by the next day in time for the event. He told me he had just contacted DHL who quoted him £800 . He got down to the PO and sent it 9 0'clock special delivery for a £10 and arrived on time for the event

[yougogal]

This is the kind of thing that those people who are ranting about never using Royal Mail again need to know. Lots of folk spitting the dummy now will be eating their words when they are paying through the nose for sending goods. An online shop that I order from has offered our 1st class service as normal, or with Fed Ex. Thing is, the item I order will cost £5.50 and £1.50p+p with us, with Fed Ex it will be £7.00p+p making the p+p cost more than the item! Plus as with a lot of these courier firms if they can't deliver you end up travelling to a depot on an industrial estate miles away to pick up your parcel. Oh thats if they havn't just dumped it on the doorstep.