Today I received an email from my 87 year-old grandma in which she penned several eloquent paragraphs lamenting the death of the written letter. Ironic stuff indeed! By Tom Kirkham
Since my grandma attended a free computer course three years back, the regularity of her emails has increased significantly, while the average daily tally of letters and parcels in the UK has fallen by nine million during the same period. I’m not suggesting that my grandma used to send nine million letters per day, but it doesn’t bode well for the Post Office if people that have spent their entire lives reliant on its services are now turning their back on them.
Royal Mail has recently come in for criticism due to its perceived lack of speed in modernising, and it’s easy to see why. We live in the internet age, where speed and convenience are the major influences on consumer behaviour. Yet our Post Office continues to present us with gigantic queues, branch closures, and the inevitable card through the letter box telling us that we were out when they tried to deliver our parcel (there are approximately 30 million UK citizens currently in some form of employment – just a thought, but maybe Royal Mail should revise its delivery times to reflect this fact?!)
It’s slow, inconvenient, frustrating, and the antithesis of a 21st Century service, so it’s no wonder that wherever possible, the UK public now seems to be attempting to bypass the need for physical transportation altogether. While standard postage services are overpriced and courier services are aimed squarely at the business rather than consumer realm, you can send and receive messages, music, pictures, video, and all manner of virtual gifts on social networking sites for free.
Personally, I can’t think of anything more meaningless and more indicative of a society that has lost the plot than sending someone a virtual birthday cake. It’s a hollow, apathetic substitute for the real thing, yet sadly people seem to feel that sending the real thing has become far more trouble than it’s worth.
If we want to avoid retreating permanently into this insubstantial virtual reality, we need greater competition, innovation and above all flexibility in our postal services, using the internet to improve their efficiency rather than usurp them – for example, providing location-based services to tell you where your postal worker is and when you’re likely to expect them. Not only would this help reduce the widespread discontent currently levelled at the Post Office, but as an added bonus, giving households an advance warning would surely help reduce incidents such as this, and more peculiarly, this.
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