Mon-fri rumour

[DGH]

The USO demands:

At least one delivery of letters every Monday to Saturday to every address in the UK.
At least one delivery of other parcels every Monday to Friday to every address in the UK.

[postslippete]

The one area where there is scope for huge growth isn't parcels though, its actually the letters, but RM seem to be scaling down their letters business.

There's no growth with letters, it's shrinking a hell of a lot. You can tell by just looking at sequencing batch sizes when there isn't a bulk posting. I don't think it's going to be too long before RM start mothballing machines

Yes you're right, the letters business is shrinking and why is that?? Is it really because of the internet and e-mails or is it because RM have consistently put their prices up year on year as regards letters? RM have done this because the regulator enabled companies like UKMail to have a big hand in processing our mail and now they take a percentage of our potential profits. Whether its been deliberate by RM or not; I can't think of any other reasons why we often used to get 3 or 4 full trays of mech on our 1st wave, whereas now we are barely just getting 2.

[DGH]

Ten years ago we used to get monthly through the post:

Electric bill
Phone bill
2 x mobile phone bills
2 x bank statements
2 x credit card statements
5 x wage slips (4 of these being RM)
3 x magazines by subscription

Now we still get all those things (barring one magazine), except that they all come electronically apart from:

1 x bank statement
1 x credit card bill
4 x wage slips (RM)

So that's a reduction of over 50%. And if you remove the RM wage slips (which are simply a cost to RM), it's a reduction of 80%.

None of that has anything whatsoever to do with postage costs, it's simply more convenient and frankly less wasteful.

Granted stuff like water bills come quarterly and the council sends us a council tax statement once a year. That hasn't changed. But if we could receive them electronically, we would.

We get significantly less 'unwanted' mail now too. Fewer marketing letters and, usually, fewer door to doors.

I don't believe this is exceptional and has nowt to do with RM pricing, except possibly to force it upwards because of the drop in volume.