Putting things in boxes

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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A few years ago, in a moment of visionary genius, I realised that, over time, more and more products were going to be sold over the internet. Amazon’s business was growing at an extraordinary rate.

At the time, Amazon had made its name as the website of choice for books. Now, of course, Amazon sells virtually everything. But I remember thinking that books were a great place to start because, especially if you bought one at a time, they fitted conveniently through your average domestic letter-box.

Generally speaking, though, if you bought more than one book, or anything larger than the size of your letter-box, you had to be at home or a little card was popped through your door telling you that the Post Office had tried delivering a package but that, in order to retrieve it, and most annoyingly, you would have to pick it up yourself - back at the Post Office.

Well, I didn’t know much about the Post Office other than posting letters in nice, warm-red pillar boxes and receiving them through my letter-box. But I did know that sometime, somehow, somewhere, a box containing my online order arrived at the Post Office, was loaded into a nice red van and driven to my house. Then, if I was out, the driver would drive my box back to the Post Office it came from – with my order still undelivered.

In this new-age world, with more and more people buying more and more products online, this all seemed a rather inefficient, and decidedly non-eco-friendly, delivery system.

Now, please put all of the above in a little box in your head because while I realised this was happening, I became aware of another market trend.

More and more, at a rate similar to the growth in online purchasing, I read that Post Offices were being closed all over the country. In fact, the deeper into the country you lived, the more likely would it be that your Post Office would be closed. This meant that if you jumped onto the bandwagon of buying products online, but were not at home for them to be delivered, the wagon with your box in it would drive even further to find you were out and even further back to where it had come from.

Surely, if there was a system where you asked for your products to be delivered to your Post Office and that the card saying it had arrived was delivered by lunchtime with the rest of your morning mail, then you could go and collect your order at your convenience?

And surely this would save time and petrol and carbon for the Post Office as well as provide an exciting new reason for your local branch to survive?

Online retailers would offer their customers two options:

1. Would you like your order delivered to your home?

2. Would you like your order delivered to your local Post Office for you to “collect at your convenience (you will be notified when it arrives)”?

By saving all the inefficiencies outlined above, Option 2 might even be cheaper, creating a win-win-win situation. No need to close Post Offices (and perhaps the opportunity to open bigger and better branches); online retailers offering a choice of delivery options (and possibly cost savings); consumers in more control of their purchasing decisions (and supporting the survival of their local Post Office, especially in rural areas).

Perhaps, even, the Post Office could develop an expansion strategy? Maybe they have a wider product offering than they think? Maybe, because they have to store all these undelivered boxes, they Post Office has become a STORAGE, as well as a DELIVERY, service?

Why not invest in those storage places that have sprung up all over the place (especially those revolting, ugly, intrusive, big yellow ones which you can paint in your nice, warm, royal, pillar-box red)? There’s lots of boxes in those and they make lots of money. And yes, PO, you can charge money for storage. Even if only pennies a day, there'll be lots of them.

So come on PO – please don’t GO, we want you to GROW!

What a great idea. I dreamt of my destiny as a dotcom millionaire and, on 2 November 2005, I wrote to the Post Office. I told them what their problem was (but I didn’t tell them my solution).

What happened? Well I know my letter arrived, because a person describing himself as ‘Managing Director’ of a branch of the Post Office called me. He asked me to tell him my idea over the phone. I replied that if I did that, the Post Office could nick my idea (and my millions). He told me the Post Office had loads of new ideas and if I wouldn’t tell him mine over the phone, then he wasn’t interested. He put me back in my box.

Much more recently, Adam Crozier has been on the box. On the Andrew Marr Show (BBC Sun 27 Oct 09) he said: "Our market in the letters side is shrinking all the time whilst, at the same time, we are growing massively in terms of packets and parcels".

There you go. Even the Post Office agrees with what I told them would happen four years ago. So now we have more and more products being sold online, more and more boxes being driven around in more and more vans to more and more empty houses and more and more Post Offices being closed - apparently, since 1997, the number of post office branches has fallen from 19,000 to 11,000.

Can this be right?

And where did I go wrong?

[music4essex]

Well thought out idea TBT just a shame those idiots did not think the same . we would not be in the crisis we are


Essex mum

[Lincox]

I have been saying this in a few of my comments. We do not have the entrepreneurs in Royal Mail to think outside of the box. They have blinkered vision and can only see a future of cost reductions, slashing the manual workforce for short term results. They make me lol when they talk about innovative new products. Where are they. With the right forward looking management this company could be a standard to the rest of the world. It is being held up by a government that also only looks inward, who have appointed a management team of individuals who have no track record of taking a company on to greater heights.

[chunk]

Great idea! if only 10% of customers adopted it id have a lot more room in my bags for letters.
why not offer a discounted rate eg £1 cashback for a customer who opts for the pick up option !
for arguments say only on postage of £6 or above.
It is counter intuitive paying customers to deliver their own parcels but
offering more choice attracts customers and the benifits to postman would be enormous.
we still have a network of offices which tnt and the like dont .
Their customers often have to travel 30 miles to pick up a parcel.