“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Oh, interesting point of view. Would it be less "boring on here" if we also (along with one Putin apologist) we added some apologists for other murderous war criminals? How about a few Mussolini apologists? Perhaps a few that might offer a defence of Pol Pot or present day deniers of the Holocaust? Why not invite in some defenders of the Rwandan genocide or the massacre at Srebrenica?
Perhaps all those type of people will think themselves to be very independent in their thinking. Most sentient human beings will just regard them as complete twats.
Already is the case. Plenty of British Empire apologists.
Well, if the Russian invasion of Ukraine isn't Imperialistic, then the British Empire wasn't Imperialistic either.
Indeed, it was probably anti-Imperialistic according to the view above.
I imagine that the opinion being characterised above is that the United States is the global hegemon, therefore anything strengthening the US-led world order is imperialistic, and vice versa, even if it involves instances of oppression. If you believe that, then the British Empire was the hegemon of its time, and so the EIC was imperialistic.
So the moment that the British Empire wasn't a hegemon.....? Definitely behind the USSR after 1945, for example.
I imagine that by 1945, they would characterise the British Empire as a dependent of American imperial power due to Britain's reliance on the US to win the war and reclaim its lost territories from Japan, but I'm not sure what the orthodox reading would be between 1918 and 1939. As for Russia, it would surely be taken as an expansionist power rather than an imperial power, since almost every country that could be dominated by Russia prefers the counter-influence of the US or China or Turkey.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
A question. A relative runs a business supplying materials for the construction industry on a same day courier basis in London. Your site is out of concrete sawing blades - get them in an hour, rather than send a guy in a van etc...
He naturally uses couriers who are local to the areas he covers, who specialise in on spec rapid delivery.
How would you differentiate, if at all, for such businesses?
Simple If you company offers delivery services beyond x% of the country - it needs to provide the service to the entire country.
Then you would rapidly find that services would be setup that carefully do x%-0.00000000001% of the country.
Not a problem because it would not impact the big national delivery companies. If they want to keep operating they have to comply with the regulations. Hermes made a profit on its UK business of £1.5 billion last year. They can afford to subsidise deliveries to the more remote (and some not so remote) parts of the country if they want to keep operating.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Depends how much you drink I suppose. As per Malc's "sometimes you get a hit or miss" - those misses are very costly, relatively (or absolutely).
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
Just to point out there is a world of difference between Ethiopian and Georgian wines. The firmer are no doubt very pleasant but very low volume novelties. The latter is the oldest wine making country in the world and a global viticultural giant.
20th largest producer in the world, growing in double digits per year and with huge variety and (mainly) high quality as well as dozens of indigenous varieties.
There’s actually a fully functioning Georgian winery as an annex of Plumpton viticulture college. It’s part of the degree curriculum.
Thank you for the correction/elaboration.
And is their national grape the pzytziskia?
The two biggest ones are Saperavi for red and Rkatsiteli for white.
Interesting. I note (wiki) that most of the "most notable" wines that Saperavi make are semi-sweet.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Should the rest of the country be subsidising rural drivers so that they aren't out of pocket due to driving further to the supermarket or to visit friends and family?
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Should the rest of the country be subsidising rural drivers so that they aren't out of pocket due to driving further to the supermarket or to visit friends and family?
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
You can't get parcels delivered by the Internet, only order them
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Depends how much you drink I suppose. As per Malc's "sometimes you get a hit or miss" - those misses are very costly, relatively (or absolutely).
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
Just to point out there is a world of difference between Ethiopian and Georgian wines. The firmer are no doubt very pleasant but very low volume novelties. The latter is the oldest wine making country in the world and a global viticultural giant.
20th largest producer in the world, growing in double digits per year and with huge variety and (mainly) high quality as well as dozens of indigenous varieties.
There’s actually a fully functioning Georgian winery as an annex of Plumpton viticulture college. It’s part of the degree curriculum.
Yes, I wasn't claiming that Ethiopia is the new Rhone Valley. I was merely pointing out that decent local wine is now so ubiquitous you can get a rather pleasant domestic red wine in Addis Abbaba
Georgian wine is ancient, remarkable, and fascinating. Tho it is not the oldest wine making country in the world. There are older contenders: I went in to a cave in Armenia on my recent visit and was told the stone vats inside make it the most ancient winery in the world. Brilliantly, archaeologists have found traces of a grape variety in the caves that is STILL being used in Armenian wine. You can buy it in a vinoteca next door to the cave
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Should the rest of the country be subsidising rural drivers so that they aren't out of pocket due to driving further to the supermarket or to visit friends and family?
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
Water is an interesting one. Lots of people round here have private wells and private sewerage disposal. Why is a postal service for parcels a more fundamental service than water?
Completely off topic, but too funny not to share: The closest grocery store to me, Metropolitan (part of a small area chain), carries a brand of bottled water called -- I am not making this up -- Liquid Death. They have several varieties and say that the water comes from a mineral rich source.
You can find the company web site with a simple search, if you are curious.
For the record: In general I find the "natural" claims for foods and drinks mostly annoying Green superstition, though of course the campaigns against GMOs have been actively harmful, especially to less developed nations. But this one is mostly funny.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Oh, interesting point of view. Would it be less "boring on here" if we also (along with one Putin apologist) we added some apologists for other murderous war criminals? How about a few Mussolini apologists? Perhaps a few that might offer a defence of Pol Pot or present day deniers of the Holocaust? Why not invite in some defenders of the Rwandan genocide or the massacre at Srebrenica?
Perhaps all those type of people will think themselves to be very independent in their thinking. Most sentient human beings will just regard them as complete twats.
Already is the case. Plenty of British Empire apologists.
Well, if the Russian invasion of Ukraine isn't Imperialistic, then the British Empire wasn't Imperialistic either.
Indeed, it was probably anti-Imperialistic according to the view above.
Given that there were supposed to be 6 million Russian speakers living in Germany (pre last year's invasion), many of whom were supposed to be fairly sympathetic to Putin, getting 2000 people to turn out for a demonstration in a city of a million people is quite a poor showing.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Should the rest of the country be subsidising rural drivers so that they aren't out of pocket due to driving further to the supermarket or to visit friends and family?
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
The internet cannot replace delivery services., Every single thing you order over the internet has to be delivered to somewhere close enough to you for you to pick it up, even if not actually to your door. The current system seriously warps the whole nature of online retail as it results in many small firms saying they will not accept orders from large parts of the country because of prohibitive postage costs. Indeed it has become such a problem that Amazon have had to put rules in place for all their sellers saying they are not allowed to discriminate in this way and that has driven many small businesses off Amazon as a selling platform. When 1/6th of your country is being prevented from making use of the normal retail system, the state needs to regulate to ensure this doesn't continue.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Depends how much you drink I suppose. As per Malc's "sometimes you get a hit or miss" - those misses are very costly, relatively (or absolutely).
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
Just to point out there is a world of difference between Ethiopian and Georgian wines. The firmer are no doubt very pleasant but very low volume novelties. The latter is the oldest wine making country in the world and a global viticultural giant.
20th largest producer in the world, growing in double digits per year and with huge variety and (mainly) high quality as well as dozens of indigenous varieties.
There’s actually a fully functioning Georgian winery as an annex of Plumpton viticulture college. It’s part of the degree curriculum.
Yes, I wasn't claiming that Ethiopia is the new Rhone Valley. I was merely pointing out that decent local wine is now so ubiquitous you can get a rather pleasant domestic red wine in Addis Abbaba
Georgian wine is ancient, remarkable, and fascinating. Tho it is not the oldest wine making country in the world. There are older contenders: I went in to a cave in Armenia on my recent visit and was told the stone vats inside make it the most ancient winery in the world. Brilliantly, archaeologists have found traces of a grape variety in the caves that is STILL being used in Armenian wine. You can buy it in a vinoteca next door to the cave
Oldest wine is of course contested: the Georgians have found remnants of old skins with wine traces on them apparently even older.
I think fair to say Georgia has the most compelling claim as a large scale producer but I wouldn’t be surprised if the real oldest production was in Mesopotamia.
Completely off topic, but too funny not to share: The closest grocery store to me, Metropolitan (part of a small area chain), carries a brand of bottled water called -- I am not making this up -- Liquid Death. They have several varieties and say that the water comes from a mineral rich source.
You can find the company web site with a simple search, if you are curious.
For the record: In general I find the "natural" claims for foods and drinks mostly annoying Green superstition, though of course the campaigns against GMOs have been actively harmful, especially to less developed nations. But this one is mostly funny.
Your last para is completely wrong in my opinion. Afaics companies like Monsanto just want to control the growing of crops in third world countries to create a totally captive market for themselves.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Depends how much you drink I suppose. As per Malc's "sometimes you get a hit or miss" - those misses are very costly, relatively (or absolutely).
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
Just to point out there is a world of difference between Ethiopian and Georgian wines. The firmer are no doubt very pleasant but very low volume novelties. The latter is the oldest wine making country in the world and a global viticultural giant.
20th largest producer in the world, growing in double digits per year and with huge variety and (mainly) high quality as well as dozens of indigenous varieties.
There’s actually a fully functioning Georgian winery as an annex of Plumpton viticulture college. It’s part of the degree curriculum.
Yes, I wasn't claiming that Ethiopia is the new Rhone Valley. I was merely pointing out that decent local wine is now so ubiquitous you can get a rather pleasant domestic red wine in Addis Abbaba
Georgian wine is ancient, remarkable, and fascinating. Tho it is not the oldest wine making country in the world. There are older contenders: I went in to a cave in Armenia on my recent visit and was told the stone vats inside make it the most ancient winery in the world. Brilliantly, archaeologists have found traces of a grape variety in the caves that is STILL being used in Armenian wine. You can buy it in a vinoteca next door to the cave
Oldest wine is of course contested: the Georgians have found remnants of old skins with wine traces on them apparently even older.
I think fair to say Georgia has the most compelling claim as a large scale producer but I wouldn’t be surprised if the real oldest production was in Mesopotamia.
Georgia and Armenia were probably the same "culture" back in 4000BC, so it's probably a silly debate
Suffice to say the oldest wine making traditions are likely in the Caucasus: as things stand
But they were brewing beer at Gobekli Tepe in 9,000BC, and it would not wholly surprise me if they made some kind of wine as well
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Should the rest of the country be subsidising rural drivers so that they aren't out of pocket due to driving further to the supermarket or to visit friends and family?
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
Water is an interesting one. Lots of people round here have private wells and private sewerage disposal. Why is a postal service for parcels a more fundamental service than water?
Oh by the way. You would deny other people a service that you yourself benefit from. Since you say you live in Ireland, An Post provides a universal postal service including parcels up to 10Kg at the same price structure for everywhere in the state with at least one delivery and one collection every working day. So you are arguing that others should not receive the same service benefits that you yourself get.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Depends how much you drink I suppose. As per Malc's "sometimes you get a hit or miss" - those misses are very costly, relatively (or absolutely).
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
Just to point out there is a world of difference between Ethiopian and Georgian wines. The firmer are no doubt very pleasant but very low volume novelties. The latter is the oldest wine making country in the world and a global viticultural giant.
20th largest producer in the world, growing in double digits per year and with huge variety and (mainly) high quality as well as dozens of indigenous varieties.
There’s actually a fully functioning Georgian winery as an annex of Plumpton viticulture college. It’s part of the degree curriculum.
Thank you for the correction/elaboration.
And is their national grape the pzytziskia?
The two biggest ones are Saperavi for red and Rkatsiteli for white.
Interesting. I note (wiki) that most of the "most notable" wines that Saperavi make are semi-sweet.
I imagine because their main market is Russia? Shampansky is said to be disgustingly sweet. It's not a particularly sweet grape, idle internetting súggests 17-20 brix at harvest; cab sauv and merlot are typically 23-25. Lots of self proclaimed dry reds available here.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Interesting. I wonder what the strike rate is in terms of enjoyment or good/bad - 7/10? 8/10? And what if you have a dp and want to give everyone the same wine for example.
I can't be doing with the faff or uncertainty. Plus if you want diversity then you find plenty within the Old World regions with imo more reliability. But as I said it sounds like a fun approach and if you are enjoying it then I would never gainsay the pleasure it gives you.
I buy mixed cases selected personally from Naked Wines as well. As per Leon I enjoy it , sometimes hit and miss but makes it very interesting and usually they match the reviews.
As I said good for you. If I like a wine I like to have a case or two of it and I can't be doing with the odd bottle here and there. Plus "sometimes hit and miss" for the amount I drink (a lot less and more discerningly than years ago) is a huge waste of money.
The big divide between middle-aged wine drinkers is between whose who merely seek familiarity and those who seek variety.
There's also those who just seek oblivion.
Perhaps a quicker path than reading through all of Leon's PB posts?
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Should the rest of the country be subsidising rural drivers so that they aren't out of pocket due to driving further to the supermarket or to visit friends and family?
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
The internet cannot replace delivery services., Every single thing you order over the internet has to be delivered to somewhere close enough to you for you to pick it up, even if not actually to your door. The current system seriously warps the whole nature of online retail as it results in many small firms saying they will not accept orders from large parts of the country because of prohibitive postage costs. Indeed it has become such a problem that Amazon have had to put rules in place for all their sellers saying they are not allowed to discriminate in this way and that has driven many small businesses off Amazon as a selling platform. When 1/6th of your country is being prevented from making use of the normal retail system, the state needs to regulate to ensure this doesn't continue.
Lots of online businesses I have ordered deliveries from have different delivery rates for different destinations, depending on the costs involved.
I don't see why rural areas of Britain should be immune from bearing the cost of delivering to them, or why businesses wouldn't want to offer delivery to such areas at a rate that covers their costs.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Interesting. I wonder what the strike rate is in terms of enjoyment or good/bad - 7/10? 8/10? And what if you have a dp and want to give everyone the same wine for example.
I can't be doing with the faff or uncertainty. Plus if you want diversity then you find plenty within the Old World regions with imo more reliability. But as I said it sounds like a fun approach and if you are enjoying it then I would never gainsay the pleasure it gives you.
I buy mixed cases selected personally from Naked Wines as well. As per Leon I enjoy it , sometimes hit and miss but makes it very interesting and usually they match the reviews.
As I said good for you. If I like a wine I like to have a case or two of it and I can't be doing with the odd bottle here and there. Plus "sometimes hit and miss" for the amount I drink (a lot less and more discerningly than years ago) is a huge waste of money.
The big divide between middle-aged wine drinkers is between whose who merely seek familiarity and those who seek variety.
There's also those who just seek oblivion.
Perhaps a quicker path than reading through all of Leon's PB posts?
In reference to an earlier discussion, I find it useful to distinguish between the private realm and the public sphere.
In the private realm, loads of people are leading very prosperous lives. Posh restaurants are heaving, expensive cars are everywhere, expensive holidays are de rigueur, people pay large sums to watch football, cricket, music or whatever, and many people have money to burn. We are a rich country (albeit with too many poor people).
By contrast, the public sphere is severely dilapidated. Streets are dirty and unkempt, many public services are in disarray, and councils (in particular) and other public authorities don't have the money to make significant improvements. The public sphere is a total mess.
I'd like to see a political party make a serious pitch for restoring civic pride; to restore the balance between the public and the private. A slightly old-fashioned concept, perhaps. But wouldn't it be great if we could be really proud of the public sphere: proud of our neighbourhoods (streets, pavements, parks, graffiti-free buildings and so on), and proud of the services (buses, trains, hospitals, care for the elderly and so on) that we all rely on?
Need more than a political party, you would need the huge volume of scroats who drop everything at their arse, wreck things and have no principles or morals to be put down first. In thsi country you see droves of people just dropping litter at their feet, lobbing it out of car windows etc. Go abroad and you see little to nothing of teh same , towns are clean and litter free. No politician can improve these lowlife drongos or the moronic parents who bred them, though they may be following the political decline the country has seen.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
I don't really understand what you are missing out on if the postal system is bad?
Before I had a mobile phone, and when checking email meant going to a communal computer room, I would really value receiving handwritten letters from a few friends that I corresponded with. A disruption to the postal system would have cut me off from communication with these people.
But now, I've just received a photo on an app from my daughter of her wearing new socks she received for Christmas. I don't need to wait for a bank statement in the post to know how much I've borrowed on my credit card. What am I missing out on if the postal system stops working?
I have a nostalgic affection for the post. Most New Years I resolve to write more letters because I like letters. But it's definitely in the nice-to-have category rather than critical national infrastructure as it once was.
I am missing out on a reliable service to deliver letters and parcels to me in a timely manner both for personal and business use. Just like tens of millions of other people. Several million of whom still don't have any access to online services - and many of those live in exactly the remote areas that the courier services charge an arm and a leg to deliver to.
As an aside. If you live in Westhill, 6 miles from Aberdeen city centre, you officially live in Highlands and Islands and will pay up to 10 times the normal rate for deliveries with some courier firms. For this reason many smaller companies simply will not deliver to those areas.
But what sort of information is still being sent to you by post that you can't get by email?
People who live only six miles from Aberdeen can mostly cycle* in to Aberdeen to pick their stuff up - as I'm sure they do for most of their groceries, clothes, etc.
Lots of businesses organise their own logistics, either in house or with companies set up to provide a cheap/efficient/reliable/fast service, depending on the business priority. I don't see why this requires a state service.
Back in the day there would have been people who couldn't read or write, and so couldn't take advantage of the new national post system. Mostly they would find someone who was literate to help them with that, rather than to insist that the old means of communication - of town criers, and bards, etc - were retained for their benefit.
* Or drive, I guess.
If the universal service Royal Mail provides is scrapped it would cost triple the price or more to deliver parcels to remote rural areas compared to the inner city. It is vital for rural areas, another reason why I am a conservative not a classical liberal
It does cost 3 times as much to deliver to the remote rural areas. It is just not the sender who is paying the cost.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
I quite often get kinda 'mystery' mixed cases. It's always fun to explore new wines that I might well have just skimmed over in the shop or website.
For much the same reason I've recently subscribed to a veg box service from our local hippy-dippy eco shop. You can specify some particular items, and a few 'never send me this' - but other than that it's fairly seasonal & pot-luck.
Really helping me get out of the cooking rut of 'oh look! a world selection of veg on display! ... ok, some red peppers and onions it is.'.
Also. I can't honestly remember the time I had a REALLY bad wine via this method. If you do a smidgen of research you can avoid the duds.
By contrast I've has some duff wines in bars and restaurants, paying thrice the retail price
Depends how much you drink I suppose. As per Malc's "sometimes you get a hit or miss" - those misses are very costly, relatively (or absolutely).
In a restaurant you of course pay 3x the "retail" price as that is the model. But again, if you choose a nice old world wine there is no way that it will be "duff". You might have chosen one that is too young, or not to your taste, or too alcoholic or not alcoholic enough, but not duff. If it is duff you send it back.
Can't speak for Ethiopian or Georgian wines, that said.
Just to point out there is a world of difference between Ethiopian and Georgian wines. The firmer are no doubt very pleasant but very low volume novelties. The latter is the oldest wine making country in the world and a global viticultural giant.
20th largest producer in the world, growing in double digits per year and with huge variety and (mainly) high quality as well as dozens of indigenous varieties.
There’s actually a fully functioning Georgian winery as an annex of Plumpton viticulture college. It’s part of the degree curriculum.
Thank you for the correction/elaboration.
And is their national grape the pzytziskia?
The two biggest ones are Saperavi for red and Rkatsiteli for white.
Interesting. I note (wiki) that most of the "most notable" wines that Saperavi make are semi-sweet.
Georgia makes hundreds if not thousands of wines. From weird orange ones to seriously pricey reds
There is a tradition of sweet or semi sweet wines. I think Russians, then Soviets, liked sweet wine, and that tendency lingers?
Some of their most celebrated wines are unbelievably tannic. Toe curling. Not to my taste. But there are plenty of brilliant bargains, and excellent wine
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Should the rest of the country be subsidising rural drivers so that they aren't out of pocket due to driving further to the supermarket or to visit friends and family?
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
The internet cannot replace delivery services., Every single thing you order over the internet has to be delivered to somewhere close enough to you for you to pick it up, even if not actually to your door. The current system seriously warps the whole nature of online retail as it results in many small firms saying they will not accept orders from large parts of the country because of prohibitive postage costs. Indeed it has become such a problem that Amazon have had to put rules in place for all their sellers saying they are not allowed to discriminate in this way and that has driven many small businesses off Amazon as a selling platform. When 1/6th of your country is being prevented from making use of the normal retail system, the state needs to regulate to ensure this doesn't continue.
And when 97% of that 1/6th is in one subnation, you'd expect the subnation to take action and say, the cost of being allowed to do business in the central belt is doing business in Thurso.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Should the rest of the country be subsidising rural drivers so that they aren't out of pocket due to driving further to the supermarket or to visit friends and family?
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
The internet cannot replace delivery services., Every single thing you order over the internet has to be delivered to somewhere close enough to you for you to pick it up, even if not actually to your door. The current system seriously warps the whole nature of online retail as it results in many small firms saying they will not accept orders from large parts of the country because of prohibitive postage costs. Indeed it has become such a problem that Amazon have had to put rules in place for all their sellers saying they are not allowed to discriminate in this way and that has driven many small businesses off Amazon as a selling platform. When 1/6th of your country is being prevented from making use of the normal retail system, the state needs to regulate to ensure this doesn't continue.
Lots of online businesses I have ordered deliveries from have different delivery rates for different destinations, depending on the costs involved.
I don't see why rural areas of Britain should be immune from bearing the cost of delivering to them, or why businesses wouldn't want to offer delivery to such areas at a rate that covers their costs.
Because the rates are so high that people won't buy from them so companies lose custom. It is both sides of the equation who are losing out here and only the middle man who is benefitting. Moreover it is not in the interest of the country as a whole to make so much of the country impractical for habitation.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Should the rest of the country be subsidising rural drivers so that they aren't out of pocket due to driving further to the supermarket or to visit friends and family?
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
Water is an interesting one. Lots of people round here have private wells and private sewerage disposal. Why is a postal service for parcels a more fundamental service than water?
Oh by the way. You would deny other people a service that you yourself benefit from. Since you say you live in Ireland, An Post provides a universal postal service including parcels up to 10Kg at the same price structure for everywhere in the state with at least one delivery and one collection every working day. So you are arguing that others should not receive the same service benefits that you yourself get.
I'm saying that An Post shouldn't be bothering to provide that service either. It must cost them a shocking amount of money, but then their postmen are mostly a rural news/gossip distribution system anyway. Half the parish will know that we've moved here only because the postman has told them.
Our son has just called round and we were discussing the state of our NHS here in Wales
Apparently they suspected their 10 year old daughter had scarlet fever or strep and they dialled 111 on a Friday afternoon. They were held for 5 hours, and this while our daughter in law was nursing her 4 month old daughter, only to be told they were too busy but someone would contact them in due course. At 11.00pm they received a further apology and it was 10.00am the following morning when the hospital doctor phoned and agreed to send a prescription to Asda for penicillin
At 2.00pm my son called at Asda but no prescription had been faxed, so he returned at 3.00pm to hear they had the fax but they had run out of penicillin and could not prescribe the antibiotics
My son asked if he could take the prescription to other chemists, but was told this was not allowed as it was faxed to them and they should have the penicillin by the Sunday morning
This is woeful and shocking
Why is the NHS not using apps, e mail , and state of the art IT and again indicates just how appalling NHS administration is
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Should the rest of the country be subsidising rural drivers so that they aren't out of pocket due to driving further to the supermarket or to visit friends and family?
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
The internet cannot replace delivery services., Every single thing you order over the internet has to be delivered to somewhere close enough to you for you to pick it up, even if not actually to your door. The current system seriously warps the whole nature of online retail as it results in many small firms saying they will not accept orders from large parts of the country because of prohibitive postage costs. Indeed it has become such a problem that Amazon have had to put rules in place for all their sellers saying they are not allowed to discriminate in this way and that has driven many small businesses off Amazon as a selling platform. When 1/6th of your country is being prevented from making use of the normal retail system, the state needs to regulate to ensure this doesn't continue.
And when 97% of that 1/6th is in one subnation, you'd expect the subnation to take action and say, the cost of being allowed to do business in the central belt is doing business in Thurso.
It isn't. Both large parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland suffer from this. And it sets a precedent. Once the universal postal service goes then there is nothing to stop delivery companies extending the policy of differential pricing to other parts of the country as well.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
I don't really understand what you are missing out on if the postal system is bad?
Before I had a mobile phone, and when checking email meant going to a communal computer room, I would really value receiving handwritten letters from a few friends that I corresponded with. A disruption to the postal system would have cut me off from communication with these people.
But now, I've just received a photo on an app from my daughter of her wearing new socks she received for Christmas. I don't need to wait for a bank statement in the post to know how much I've borrowed on my credit card. What am I missing out on if the postal system stops working?
I have a nostalgic affection for the post. Most New Years I resolve to write more letters because I like letters. But it's definitely in the nice-to-have category rather than critical national infrastructure as it once was.
I am missing out on a reliable service to deliver letters and parcels to me in a timely manner both for personal and business use. Just like tens of millions of other people. Several million of whom still don't have any access to online services - and many of those live in exactly the remote areas that the courier services charge an arm and a leg to deliver to.
As an aside. If you live in Westhill, 6 miles from Aberdeen city centre, you officially live in Highlands and Islands and will pay up to 10 times the normal rate for deliveries with some courier firms. For this reason many smaller companies simply will not deliver to those areas.
But what sort of information is still being sent to you by post that you can't get by email?
People who live only six miles from Aberdeen can mostly cycle* in to Aberdeen to pick their stuff up - as I'm sure they do for most of their groceries, clothes, etc.
Lots of businesses organise their own logistics, either in house or with companies set up to provide a cheap/efficient/reliable/fast service, depending on the business priority. I don't see why this requires a state service.
Back in the day there would have been people who couldn't read or write, and so couldn't take advantage of the new national post system. Mostly they would find someone who was literate to help them with that, rather than to insist that the old means of communication - of town criers, and bards, etc - were retained for their benefit.
* Or drive, I guess.
If the universal service Royal Mail provides is scrapped it would cost triple the price or more to deliver parcels to remote rural areas compared to the inner city. It is vital for rural areas, another reason why I am a conservative not a classical liberal
It does cost 3 times as much to deliver to the remote rural areas. It is just not the sender who is paying the cost.
They aren't, Royal Mail effectively subsidise it through the USO. As I said earlier I think the taxpayer should subsidise the USO and support our rural areas
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Interesting. I wonder what the strike rate is in terms of enjoyment or good/bad - 7/10? 8/10? And what if you have a dp and want to give everyone the same wine for example.
I can't be doing with the faff or uncertainty. Plus if you want diversity then you find plenty within the Old World regions with imo more reliability. But as I said it sounds like a fun approach and if you are enjoying it then I would never gainsay the pleasure it gives you.
I buy mixed cases selected personally from Naked Wines as well. As per Leon I enjoy it , sometimes hit and miss but makes it very interesting and usually they match the reviews.
As I said good for you. If I like a wine I like to have a case or two of it and I can't be doing with the odd bottle here and there. Plus "sometimes hit and miss" for the amount I drink (a lot less and more discerningly than years ago) is a huge waste of money.
The big divide between middle-aged wine drinkers is between whose who merely seek familiarity and those who seek variety.
The more you look into the polling the more the apparent volatility is either churn between, or different methodologies for, the balance between the big 2 and smaller parties. Looking at LLG vs Refcon makes things a bit more stable. Take the last 5 polls for example:
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Should the rest of the country be subsidising rural drivers so that they aren't out of pocket due to driving further to the supermarket or to visit friends and family?
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
The internet cannot replace delivery services., Every single thing you order over the internet has to be delivered to somewhere close enough to you for you to pick it up, even if not actually to your door. The current system seriously warps the whole nature of online retail as it results in many small firms saying they will not accept orders from large parts of the country because of prohibitive postage costs. Indeed it has become such a problem that Amazon have had to put rules in place for all their sellers saying they are not allowed to discriminate in this way and that has driven many small businesses off Amazon as a selling platform. When 1/6th of your country is being prevented from making use of the normal retail system, the state needs to regulate to ensure this doesn't continue.
Lots of online businesses I have ordered deliveries from have different delivery rates for different destinations, depending on the costs involved.
I don't see why rural areas of Britain should be immune from bearing the cost of delivering to them, or why businesses wouldn't want to offer delivery to such areas at a rate that covers their costs.
Because the rates are so high that people won't buy from them so companies lose custom. It is both sides of the equation who are losing out here and only the middle man who is benefitting. Moreover it is not in the interest of the country as a whole to make so much of the country impractical for habitation.
Impractical for habitation? Because you have to pay a modest surcharge for deliveries of soft furnishings?
Lots of things are more expensive in rural areas because the volumes are lower and the distances greater - food, fuel, everything.
Why should deliveries of knitting wool, earrings, or toy soldiers be exempt from this?
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
There have always been other physical deliveries. In the days before cars and supermarkets there were a lot of businesses that did a lot of relatively local deliveries.
That national post system existed for letters, not for physical goods, and when letters were a vital means of communication. Parcels were grafted on because the network already existed, but the penny post wasn't instituted for parcels.
We don't have a national system of distribution for goods. There's no reason why we should have one for parcels.
Back in the day the volume of letters was sufficient to support several postal deliveries a day. Most people simply don't get that many parcel deliveries, never will, and a lot of the deliveries they do get will be managed by the companies concerned - the local supermarket, the local brewery, etc. No need for a national postal service to be involved.
I disagree. If a company is to provide a service delivering to UK customers then they should only be allowed to do so if they do not discriminate against large parts of the country.
When I lived in Edinburgh I would sometimes order from a local bakery, or cheesemonger, because they did free deliveries to customers in Edinburgh. Should they have been forced to use Royal Mail?
Now that I live in West Cork I can get deliveries from a local brewery. Should they be forced to use An Post?
We knew when we moved here that we wouldn't be able to get takeaways delivered of an evening, but would have to drive to collect. Should the state postal service be setting up a rural food delivery service so that we aren't discriminated against compared to those who live in Dublin?
My argument is not about a state owned service per se but about state regulation to ensure every one has access to the same service no matter where they live. Whether that is by a state owned service or a regulated private company is immaterial as long as they meet specific standards, one of which would be geographic price uniformity .
Should the rest of the country be subsidising rural drivers so that they aren't out of pocket due to driving further to the supermarket or to visit friends and family?
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
The internet cannot replace delivery services., Every single thing you order over the internet has to be delivered to somewhere close enough to you for you to pick it up, even if not actually to your door. The current system seriously warps the whole nature of online retail as it results in many small firms saying they will not accept orders from large parts of the country because of prohibitive postage costs. Indeed it has become such a problem that Amazon have had to put rules in place for all their sellers saying they are not allowed to discriminate in this way and that has driven many small businesses off Amazon as a selling platform. When 1/6th of your country is being prevented from making use of the normal retail system, the state needs to regulate to ensure this doesn't continue.
And when 97% of that 1/6th is in one subnation, you'd expect the subnation to take action and say, the cost of being allowed to do business in the central belt is doing business in Thurso.
It isn't. Both large parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland suffer from this. And it sets a precedent. Once the universal postal service goes then there is nothing to stop delivery companies extending the policy of differential pricing to other parts of the country as well.
And what's wrong with that?
It's not like houses in the countryside have the same price as sink terraced estates do, so postage cost the same?
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
A torpedo by Torry peer @Dannythefink: "Laws will not be made in Europe without parliamentary involvement, but in Britain without parliamentary involvement. This makes a farce of the idea that we left the EU to restore democratic control over law." ~AA
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
Our son has just called round and we were discussing the state of our NHS here in Wales
Apparently they suspected their 10 year old daughter had scarlet fever or strep and they dialled 111 on a Friday afternoon. They were held for 5 hours, and this while our daughter in law was nursing her 4 month old daughter, only to be told they were too busy but someone would contact them in due course. At 11.00pm they received a further apology and it was 10.00am the following morning when the hospital doctor phoned and agreed to send a prescription to Asda for penicillin
At 2.00pm my son called at Asda but no prescription had been faxed, so he returned at 3.00pm to hear they had the fax but they had run out of penicillin and could not prescribe the antibiotics
My son asked if he could take the prescription to other chemists, but was told this was not allowed as it was faxed to them and they should have the penicillin by the Sunday morning
This is woeful and shocking
Why is the NHS not using apps, e mail , and state of the art IT and again indicates just how appalling NHS administration is
An awful story of inefficiency. Sorry for what your grand-daughter has been through.
The NHS is one of the hold-outs on fax machines despite Matt Hancock trying to stop them from buying the blasted things in 2018.
Given that the NHS is unable, unlike the rest of the economy, to give up fax machines it may explain some of the other difficulties it has!
On a more positive note, they can do some things right. My mother caught Covid for the first time this week. She was on the Covid vulnerable list and had received 6 vaccinations. She reported her positive test through the government website and her GP was then automatically informed.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Yes, but you are not buying in to being price-fixed against. There's a very cartellish flavour about the pricing of H&I deliveries.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
I don't really understand what you are missing out on if the postal system is bad?
Before I had a mobile phone, and when checking email meant going to a communal computer room, I would really value receiving handwritten letters from a few friends that I corresponded with. A disruption to the postal system would have cut me off from communication with these people.
But now, I've just received a photo on an app from my daughter of her wearing new socks she received for Christmas. I don't need to wait for a bank statement in the post to know how much I've borrowed on my credit card. What am I missing out on if the postal system stops working?
I have a nostalgic affection for the post. Most New Years I resolve to write more letters because I like letters. But it's definitely in the nice-to-have category rather than critical national infrastructure as it once was.
I am missing out on a reliable service to deliver letters and parcels to me in a timely manner both for personal and business use. Just like tens of millions of other people. Several million of whom still don't have any access to online services - and many of those live in exactly the remote areas that the courier services charge an arm and a leg to deliver to.
As an aside. If you live in Westhill, 6 miles from Aberdeen city centre, you officially live in Highlands and Islands and will pay up to 10 times the normal rate for deliveries with some courier firms. For this reason many smaller companies simply will not deliver to those areas.
But what sort of information is still being sent to you by post that you can't get by email?
People who live only six miles from Aberdeen can mostly cycle* in to Aberdeen to pick their stuff up - as I'm sure they do for most of their groceries, clothes, etc.
Lots of businesses organise their own logistics, either in house or with companies set up to provide a cheap/efficient/reliable/fast service, depending on the business priority. I don't see why this requires a state service.
Back in the day there would have been people who couldn't read or write, and so couldn't take advantage of the new national post system. Mostly they would find someone who was literate to help them with that, rather than to insist that the old means of communication - of town criers, and bards, etc - were retained for their benefit.
* Or drive, I guess.
I'm waiting for my renewed driving license to arrive. But it does seem to be only government communications that arrive by post these days.
The Policy Exchange used the data to create this chart on shared priorities (green), divisive policies (yellow), ones that few care about (blue) and ones with significant opposition (red - anti-strike laws, cracking down on environmental protests, anti-trans)
Interestingly, some policies put forward in the polling had almost as many people actively opposed as actively for, often split down party and age demographic lines
Our son has just called round and we were discussing the state of our NHS here in Wales
Apparently they suspected their 10 year old daughter had scarlet fever or strep and they dialled 111 on a Friday afternoon. They were held for 5 hours, and this while our daughter in law was nursing her 4 month old daughter, only to be told they were too busy but someone would contact them in due course. At 11.00pm they received a further apology and it was 10.00am the following morning when the hospital doctor phoned and agreed to send a prescription to Asda for penicillin
At 2.00pm my son called at Asda but no prescription had been faxed, so he returned at 3.00pm to hear they had the fax but they had run out of penicillin and could not prescribe the antibiotics
My son asked if he could take the prescription to other chemists, but was told this was not allowed as it was faxed to them and they should have the penicillin by the Sunday morning
This is woeful and shocking
Why is the NHS not using apps, e mail , and state of the art IT and again indicates just how appalling NHS administration is
An awful story of inefficiency. Sorry for what your grand-daughter has been through.
The NHS is one of the hold-outs on fax machines despite Matt Hancock trying to stop them from buying the blasted things in 2018.
Given that the NHS is unable, unlike the rest of the economy, to give up fax machines it may explain some of the other difficulties it has!
On a more positive note, they can do some things right. My mother caught Covid for the first time this week. She was on the Covid vulnerable list and had received 6 vaccinations. She reported her positive test through the government website and her GP was then automatically informed.
They should remember the old saying, you shouldn't let the fax get in the way of a happy outcome.
I'm really sorry to hear what poor Big G's family have been going through, that's an absolute joke.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
When last I checked Yorkshire was in the north east of England.
A torpedo by Torry peer @Dannythefink: "Laws will not be made in Europe without parliamentary involvement, but in Britain without parliamentary involvement. This makes a farce of the idea that we left the EU to restore democratic control over law." ~AA
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
When last I checked Yorkshire was in the north east of England.
No, it is in Yorkshire and Humber region not the North East region
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
When last I checked Yorkshire was in the north east of England.
You should check again. The Republic of Yorkshire stands, magnificently, alone.
Our son has just called round and we were discussing the state of our NHS here in Wales
Apparently they suspected their 10 year old daughter had scarlet fever or strep and they dialled 111 on a Friday afternoon. They were held for 5 hours, and this while our daughter in law was nursing her 4 month old daughter, only to be told they were too busy but someone would contact them in due course. At 11.00pm they received a further apology and it was 10.00am the following morning when the hospital doctor phoned and agreed to send a prescription to Asda for penicillin
At 2.00pm my son called at Asda but no prescription had been faxed, so he returned at 3.00pm to hear they had the fax but they had run out of penicillin and could not prescribe the antibiotics
My son asked if he could take the prescription to other chemists, but was told this was not allowed as it was faxed to them and they should have the penicillin by the Sunday morning
This is woeful and shocking
Why is the NHS not using apps, e mail , and state of the art IT and again indicates just how appalling NHS administration is
An awful story of inefficiency. Sorry for what your grand-daughter has been through.
The NHS is one of the hold-outs on fax machines despite Matt Hancock trying to stop them from buying the blasted things in 2018.
Given that the NHS is unable, unlike the rest of the economy, to give up fax machines it may explain some of the other difficulties it has!
On a more positive note, they can do some things right. My mother caught Covid for the first time this week. She was on the Covid vulnerable list and had received 6 vaccinations. She reported her positive test through the government website and her GP was then automatically informed.
They should remember the old saying, you shouldn't let the fax get in the way of a happy outcome.
I'm really sorry to hear what poor Big G's family have been going through, that's an absolute joke.
Thanks so much
Today has been a terrible day for our family with the death in Glan Clwyd Hospital of our son's sisters partner following a cancer operation on the 22nd December and then contracting sepsis and the woeful way of prescribing possible life saving medicine to our granddaughter
The Wales NHS is as bad , if not worse than England, and yes, this is labour in charge
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
When last I checked Yorkshire was in the north east of England.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
When last I checked Yorkshire was in the north east of England.
No, it is in Yorkshire and Humber region not the North East region
Oh good grief. Sorry, everyone, I should have thought before setting him off.
Our son has just called round and we were discussing the state of our NHS here in Wales
Apparently they suspected their 10 year old daughter had scarlet fever or strep and they dialled 111 on a Friday afternoon. They were held for 5 hours, and this while our daughter in law was nursing her 4 month old daughter, only to be told they were too busy but someone would contact them in due course. At 11.00pm they received a further apology and it was 10.00am the following morning when the hospital doctor phoned and agreed to send a prescription to Asda for penicillin
At 2.00pm my son called at Asda but no prescription had been faxed, so he returned at 3.00pm to hear they had the fax but they had run out of penicillin and could not prescribe the antibiotics
My son asked if he could take the prescription to other chemists, but was told this was not allowed as it was faxed to them and they should have the penicillin by the Sunday morning
This is woeful and shocking
Why is the NHS not using apps, e mail , and state of the art IT and again indicates just how appalling NHS administration is
An awful story of inefficiency. Sorry for what your grand-daughter has been through.
The NHS is one of the hold-outs on fax machines despite Matt Hancock trying to stop them from buying the blasted things in 2018.
Given that the NHS is unable, unlike the rest of the economy, to give up fax machines it may explain some of the other difficulties it has!
On a more positive note, they can do some things right. My mother caught Covid for the first time this week. She was on the Covid vulnerable list and had received 6 vaccinations. She reported her positive test through the government website and her GP was then automatically informed.
They should remember the old saying, you shouldn't let the fax get in the way of a happy outcome.
I'm really sorry to hear what poor Big G's family have been going through, that's an absolute joke.
Thanks so much
Today has been a terrible day for our family with the death in Glan Clwyd Hospital of our son's sisters partner following a cancer operation on the 22nd December and then contracting sepsis and the woeful way of prescribing possible life saving medicine to our granddaughter
The Wales NHS is as bad , if not worse than England, and yes, this is labour in charge
When a Government loses any sense of the country it governs, it is time to go.
GE now.
I would be quite content for the Tories to leave tomorrow. They are doomed, they need to be in Opposition, Labour must have a chance at governing, the country needs to know if Starmer has an alternative (I doubt it, but we can hope). The country is palpably drifting
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
When last I checked Yorkshire was in the north east of England.
I'm so glad you didn't teach geography.
Yorkshire is the North!
Isn't that sort of a prerequisite for being in the north east?
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
When last I checked Yorkshire was in the north east of England.
No, it is in Yorkshire and Humber region not the North East region
Oh good grief. Sorry, everyone, I should have thought before setting him off.
You could be really provocative and inform him that Epping is part of North East London.
I know the point is more about political optics, than actual accounting, but the numbers do matter. The NHS got their £350m/week.
This is the closest to Nazi propaganda we've seen in this country. The idea planted in the minds of the viewer about the idea of 'others'. It was much more insidious than Farage's infamous poster. It was talked about at the time but most thought Brexit wouldn't get through so the chilling racism was ignored. But it's really part of a one minute film that shames us all. Certainly all Brexiteers.
Our son has just called round and we were discussing the state of our NHS here in Wales
Apparently they suspected their 10 year old daughter had scarlet fever or strep and they dialled 111 on a Friday afternoon. They were held for 5 hours, and this while our daughter in law was nursing her 4 month old daughter, only to be told they were too busy but someone would contact them in due course. At 11.00pm they received a further apology and it was 10.00am the following morning when the hospital doctor phoned and agreed to send a prescription to Asda for penicillin
At 2.00pm my son called at Asda but no prescription had been faxed, so he returned at 3.00pm to hear they had the fax but they had run out of penicillin and could not prescribe the antibiotics
My son asked if he could take the prescription to other chemists, but was told this was not allowed as it was faxed to them and they should have the penicillin by the Sunday morning
This is woeful and shocking
Why is the NHS not using apps, e mail , and state of the art IT and again indicates just how appalling NHS administration is
An awful story of inefficiency. Sorry for what your grand-daughter has been through.
The NHS is one of the hold-outs on fax machines despite Matt Hancock trying to stop them from buying the blasted things in 2018.
Given that the NHS is unable, unlike the rest of the economy, to give up fax machines it may explain some of the other difficulties it has!
On a more positive note, they can do some things right. My mother caught Covid for the first time this week. She was on the Covid vulnerable list and had received 6 vaccinations. She reported her positive test through the government website and her GP was then automatically informed.
They should remember the old saying, you shouldn't let the fax get in the way of a happy outcome.
I'm really sorry to hear what poor Big G's family have been going through, that's an absolute joke.
Thanks so much
Today has been a terrible day for our family with the death in Glan Clwyd Hospital of our son's sisters partner following a cancer operation on the 22nd December and then contracting sepsis and the woeful way of prescribing possible life saving medicine to our granddaughter
The Wales NHS is as bad , if not worse than England, and yes, this is labour in charge
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
When last I checked Yorkshire was in the north east of England.
No, it is in Yorkshire and Humber region not the North East region
Oh good grief. Sorry, everyone, I should have thought before setting him off.
You could be really provocative and inform him that Epping is part of North East London.
It isn't, it is in Essex. Though we now live nearer Ongar than Epping
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
A lot of those aren't really down to government, so much as "use it or lose it". And people often prefer not to use much.
There's a line somewhere; nobody in their right mind would expect a professional theatre in every hamlet, or a Tesco not- Metro, or a bus every five minutes like in That There London.
But some things clearly ought to be available on the same tetms to everyone, even if it's not strictly commercially viable. After all, city dwellers don't charge suburbanites full commercial whack for driving and parking in town. And delivery of letters, even if it's not as essential as it used to be, feels like it's in the same category. It's one of the things nations do.
But a final point for villagers concerned about the future of their school, church and shop. There's one crazy trick that can increase the number of customers...
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
If people choose to live somewhere remote that's their choice. Why should others be put out for their choices?
Being Liberal means making your own choices, but owning the consequences too.
As I said for my in laws there's a single village post office and everyone's post is delivered there, no onward delivery. Row after row of boxes everyone has a key to their own one for letters, and someone behind the counter who handle parcels for that village.
If someone lives remote that's their choice and I respect their right to make that choice. But with choices come consequences. If a consequence is that its not viable to deliver your letter to you, then why shouldn't you take responsibility to collect it from the nearest hub?
That's a compelling and well reasoned argument.
But it is important to realise that such a policy would have costs. It would make the countryside even less attractive than cities and towns, and make it harder for people to move. The gap between urban and rural dwellers (which is already wide) would only get worse.
Better or worse is in the eye of the beholder. Being remote is worse for some, but desirable for others.
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
Certainly not more than terraces in London they aren't.
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
Says the person that pretends London isn't in the South whenever it suits his agenda.
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
It isn't, neither is Yorkshire in the same region as the North West.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
A lot of those aren't really down to government, so much as "use it or lose it". And people often prefer not to use much.
There's a line somewhere; nobody in their right mind would expect a professional theatre in every hamlet, or a Tesco not- Metro, or a bus every five minutes like in That There London.
But some things clearly ought to be available on the same tetms to everyone, even if it's not strictly commercially viable. After all, city dwellers don't charge suburbanites full commercial whack for driving and parking in town. And delivery of letters, even if it's not as essential as it used to be, feels like it's in the same category. It's one of the things nations do.
But a final point for villagers concerned about the future of their school, church and shop. There's one crazy trick that can increase the number of customers...
Well really they should be. France subsidises its rural areas and their facilities rather better than we do and has more thriving rural communities as a result.
You don't need a huge supermarket or theatre or cinema or university or even a train station or leisure centre or restaurant in a village. A pub, primary school, village shop and post office however should be there
Our son has just called round and we were discussing the state of our NHS here in Wales
Apparently they suspected their 10 year old daughter had scarlet fever or strep and they dialled 111 on a Friday afternoon. They were held for 5 hours, and this while our daughter in law was nursing her 4 month old daughter, only to be told they were too busy but someone would contact them in due course. At 11.00pm they received a further apology and it was 10.00am the following morning when the hospital doctor phoned and agreed to send a prescription to Asda for penicillin
At 2.00pm my son called at Asda but no prescription had been faxed, so he returned at 3.00pm to hear they had the fax but they had run out of penicillin and could not prescribe the antibiotics
My son asked if he could take the prescription to other chemists, but was told this was not allowed as it was faxed to them and they should have the penicillin by the Sunday morning
This is woeful and shocking
Why is the NHS not using apps, e mail , and state of the art IT and again indicates just how appalling NHS administration is
An awful story of inefficiency. Sorry for what your grand-daughter has been through.
The NHS is one of the hold-outs on fax machines despite Matt Hancock trying to stop them from buying the blasted things in 2018.
Given that the NHS is unable, unlike the rest of the economy, to give up fax machines it may explain some of the other difficulties it has!
On a more positive note, they can do some things right. My mother caught Covid for the first time this week. She was on the Covid vulnerable list and had received 6 vaccinations. She reported her positive test through the government website and her GP was then automatically informed.
They should remember the old saying, you shouldn't let the fax get in the way of a happy outcome.
I'm really sorry to hear what poor Big G's family have been going through, that's an absolute joke.
Thanks so much
Today has been a terrible day for our family with the death in Glan Clwyd Hospital of our son's sisters partner following a cancer operation on the 22nd December and then contracting sepsis and the woeful way of prescribing possible life saving medicine to our granddaughter
The Wales NHS is as bad , if not worse than England, and yes, this is labour in charge
Comments
Cross-subsidisation for essential basic services - I would include water, electricity, internet, emergency services. I don't see delivery of goods in the same category. Internet replaces the universal service obligation for letters of old.
Georgian wine is ancient, remarkable, and fascinating. Tho it is not the oldest wine making country in the world. There are older contenders: I went in to a cave in Armenia on my recent visit and was told the stone vats inside make it the most ancient winery in the world. Brilliantly, archaeologists have found traces of a grape variety in the caves that is STILL being used in Armenian wine. You can buy it in a vinoteca next door to the cave
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areni-1_cave
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areni-1_winery
1. The headline gap has increased
2. Squeezable Refuk is down to only 5%
3. Lib Dems are up into dangerous blue wall territory
LLG in the zone though: 62% is around average for recent polls, vs 32% Refcon (again fairly typical).
You can find the company web site with a simple search, if you are curious.
For the record: In general I find the "natural" claims for foods and drinks mostly annoying Green superstition, though of course the campaigns against GMOs have been actively harmful, especially to less developed nations. But this one is mostly funny.
I think fair to say Georgia has the most compelling claim as a large scale producer but I wouldn’t be surprised if the real oldest production was in Mesopotamia.
The East, South and the Midlands still the Tories best regions however
If the only way I could get any ticket to that show was to eat a pizza with a pineapple on it then I would happily do it.
Suffice to say the oldest wine making traditions are likely in the Caucasus: as things stand
But they were brewing beer at Gobekli Tepe in 9,000BC, and it would not wholly surprise me if they made some kind of wine as well
https://www.livescience.com/25855-stone-age-beer-brewery-discovered.html
I don't see why rural areas of Britain should be immune from bearing the cost of delivering to them, or why businesses wouldn't want to offer delivery to such areas at a rate that covers their costs.
It is just not the sender who is paying the cost.
There is a tradition of sweet or semi sweet wines. I think Russians, then Soviets, liked sweet wine, and that tendency lingers?
Some of their most celebrated wines are unbelievably tannic. Toe curling. Not to my taste. But there are plenty of brilliant bargains, and excellent wine
Leading the best PM metric isn't the slam dunk you think it is.
Apparently they suspected their 10 year old daughter had scarlet fever or strep and they dialled 111 on a Friday afternoon. They were held for 5 hours, and this while our daughter in law was nursing her 4 month old daughter, only to be told they were too busy but someone would contact them in due course. At 11.00pm they received a further apology and it was 10.00am the following morning when the hospital doctor phoned and agreed to send a prescription to Asda for penicillin
At 2.00pm my son called at Asda but no prescription had been faxed, so he returned at 3.00pm to hear they had the fax but they had run out of penicillin and could not prescribe the antibiotics
My son asked if he could take the prescription to other chemists, but was told this was not allowed as it was faxed to them and they should have the penicillin by the Sunday morning
This is woeful and shocking
Why is the NHS not using apps, e mail , and state of the art IT and again indicates just how appalling NHS administration is
Rishi Sunak Approval Rating (2-3 January):
Disapprove: 31% (-2)
Approve: 27% (-3)
Net: -4% (-1)
Changes +/- 11 December
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-2-3-january-2023 https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1610322654048784385/photo/1
Keir Starmer's approval rating is +10% in the first poll of 2023, up from -7% in the first poll of 2022.
Keir Starmer Approval Rating (2-3 January):
Approve: 36% (-1)
Disapprove: 26% (-1)
Net: +10% (–)
Changes +/- 11 December
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-2-3-january-2023 https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1610325170069114880/photo/1
If people don't want to be remote, nobody is saying they have to be, but if they make that choice then that's their prerogative. Expecting to have your cake and eat it too, be remote but have the world bring everything to you, isn't reasonable. If you make that choice, own your choices.
On average when I've looked countryside detached homes seem to be going for a lot more than terraces on estates in towns, so I'm not sure on what metric you are independently valuing it as "worse"?
The Tories would jump at such a result now
R&W: 62:32
People polling: 62:27
Savanta: 58:33
Omnisis: 63:31
Techne: 58:35
The gap ranges from 23 to 35 but the recent
PP seems to be exaggerated by rounding as the total was some way short of 100.
During Boris’ nadir most LLG was around the 53-57% mark and Refcon was mid to upper 30s
Lots of things are more expensive in rural areas because the volumes are lower and the distances greater - food, fuel, everything.
Why should deliveries of knitting wool, earrings, or toy soldiers be exempt from this?
It's not like houses in the countryside have the same price as sink terraced estates do, so postage cost the same?
In the North villages and the countryside are generally more expensive than the cities, in the South London is generally more expensive than the countryside and towns
One seat is vacant, due to recent death of late US Rep. Don McEachin (D-VA04)
Addendum - Speaker election begins, with nomination of Kevin McCarthy by US Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) the former moderate now full-fledged Putinist.
They don't have a 10 point best PM lead.
Nor 36% of the vote.
The final verdict was Out, and I agree
https://twitter.com/WisdenCricket/status/1609515486990966784?s=20&t=5mB1sLwq6wUQF7Y3u4ILcA
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/daniel-finkelstein-tories-bonfire-of-eu-rules-is-disreputable-5sj60vv8c
Cities and countryside can both cost more than town suburbs. Nothing new there. Everyone should be free to make whatever choice they prefer - and own any consequences of those choices.
The NHS is one of the hold-outs on fax machines despite Matt Hancock trying to stop them from buying the blasted things in 2018.
https://www.theregister.com/2018/12/10/hancock_fax_ban_nhs/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11088377/NHS-using-800-fax-machines-despite-government-vowing-phase-four-years-ago.html
Given that the NHS is unable, unlike the rest of the economy, to give up fax machines it may explain some of the other difficulties it has!
On a more positive note, they can do some things right. My mother caught Covid for the first time this week. She was on the Covid vulnerable list and had received 6 vaccinations. She reported her positive test through the government website and her GP was then automatically informed.
Other responses to the open question included “f*** all”, “not a lot” and "lying" https://twitter.com/lizziedearden/status/1609555451359760391/photo/1
She's aiming to become America's Next Wing-Nut Pin-Up. Now that Sarah Palin AND Kari Lake have gone splat.
Big write up on Stefanik in yesterday's NYT. NOT flattering, thus pretty gratifying to her & her ilk.
Interesting stuff! https://twitter.com/lizziedearden/status/1609559152124399617/photo/1
The polling found a “moderately high degree of sympathy for the current strikes” among Conservative voters https://twitter.com/lizziedearden/status/1609557805123665920/photo/1
I'm really sorry to hear what poor Big G's family have been going through, that's an absolute joke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SlhJ7lnYaI
Hakeem Jeffries being nominated, Democrats are acting more like they won than the Republicans.
However when we are talking about the North and South as a whole then yes London, including the suburbs are more expensive than the home counties countryside on the whole with a few exceptions like some of the Cotswolds or parts of the Chilterns.
As I said we also have an obligation to support our rural areas, ideally taxpayers should subsidise the universal service obligation. We also should do more to support village pubs, post offices, shops and churches and farm produce and restrict the numbers of second home owners who are only there at Weekends and price out locals
GE now.
Today has been a terrible day for our family with the death in Glan Clwyd Hospital of our son's sisters partner following a cancer operation on the 22nd December and then contracting sepsis and the woeful way of prescribing possible life saving medicine to our granddaughter
The Wales NHS is as bad , if not worse than England, and yes, this is labour in charge
Yorkshire is the North!
Now he's got 2
Just get on with it
There's a line somewhere; nobody in their right mind would expect a professional theatre in every hamlet, or a Tesco not- Metro, or a bus every five minutes like in That There London.
But some things clearly ought to be available on the same tetms to everyone, even if it's not strictly commercially viable. After all, city dwellers don't charge suburbanites full commercial whack for driving and parking in town. And delivery of letters, even if it's not as essential as it used to be, feels like it's in the same category. It's one of the things nations do.
But a final point for villagers concerned about the future of their school, church and shop. There's one crazy trick that can increase the number of customers...
You don't need a huge supermarket or theatre or cinema or university or even a train station or leisure centre or restaurant in a village. A pub, primary school, village shop and post office however should be there
#TedHeathWasAVisionary
"The most challenging winter I have seen in my career. Even our contingency planning didn't really prepare us."
Gov't says it's "normal". ~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1610335160440086528/video/1
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