What would you do?

[Fairyglass]

I have a dilemma..

We've had an increasing number of items go missing in the post since November, and it's still continuing. The value of each order is pretty low, but together we're being hit quite hard- I've had five customers notify me of non receipt this week alone.

We ship quite a few items daily by post, enough to open an account with Royal Mail directly, but we still use our local post office. We live and work in a village, and the Post Office is also the newsagent, cafe, village store, and central meeting point. We're their largest customer by some margin and it's a threatened post office. We have an arrangement with them that we deliver our parcels to them twice daily, and they weigh, frank and post them for us. We then pay them weekly- it saves us a lot of time, especially at Christmas.

Switching to an account would mean taking the business almost totally away from them and would put them at risk, and if they closed we would lose some of the soul of the village. Even using RM's trackable business service, we would save several thousand pounds a year, and hopefully ensure that more orders are not lost as they're being tracked. From a commercial perspective, it's a simple answer, but there's a social responsibility too perhaps.. do we stick with the current system and hope it improves, or jump ship and hope that the consequences aren't as bad as they might be?

Advice from those with crystal balls especially welcome

[Duncan Rounding]

Initially I think you should discuss the problem with them so they understand the situation your in, after all it may not be anything or anyone at your local post office.

[Fairyglass]

Hi Duncan,

I've spoken to the owner of the post office- he's a friend too. There's no suggestion the staff at the local post office are helping themselves- I think if that's happening it's down the line at the sorting office. We're not alone- another local business is having the same problems, but the post office owner has said that he's not been made aware of any issues apart from ours- he is investigating however.

[leehack]

Are your envelopes unique or clearly state they are yours, might be worth changing stationery completely for a few trials for a week, see if makes any difference. Posties soon learn what's what in what packages.

[Fairyglass]

We use Jan's labels, with just the customer address and order number. Most orders are in Jiffy bags, or small brown boxes- there's no marketing information or branding on the outside.

What I should have asked is, is this level of loss usual- 1 or 2% of weekly orders? It's looking pretty high to me, but I've nothing to compare it against. At what level of value do other merchants decide to upgrade to a courier or signed for service? I know these are open ended questions, but it's helpful to know we're not alone!

[Duncan Rounding]

I would think that changing to a signed for service makes sense if the loss is equal to or greater than the additional cost of the change.

Personally I have very few lost items, no idea of the percentage though, but then many of our items are by courier anyway.

[Darren B]

this looks to me as though someone is helping themselves at one of the sorting offices. I used to send everything recorded but stop a few years ago as i accepted the cost of the losses was still less than the cost spent on recorded items every year. I will also add i cant remember when i last lost something in the post. I dont send anywere near as many as you but i dont think i have had a loss in nearly 2 years

Have you reported this to royalmail and asked them to investigate, if your losing that many they will be sure to take an interest, well when you get to talk to the right person that is. See if you can talk to the depot manager first

[Fairyglass]

Thanks for the replies.. I'm compiling a list of losses which I'm going to take to RM and see what response I get. I've not bothered claiming for them as the individual costs are so low that it's not worth the time hunting out supplier invoices etc, but I've just got to that point where I'm not prepared to sit back and accept it any more.

I'm still interested in other's experiences, and will update this post as I have news. We're moving soon to an industrial unit, so it may be worthwhile changing systems at that point anyway.

[Mike Hughes]

Are your items too large to fit through the letterbox? I find that package losses with RM are more like 1-2 per thousand than per hundred.

Mind you, I probably get more customers than that asking about their delivery but here's the thing. I find that 80-90% of the time the item is waiting to be collected at their local delivery office.

So your figures sound about right. 1-2% not delivered is close enough to mine but when I tell the customer to check their local delivery office the vast majority find that they're their waiting for them. hence the 0.1 - 0.2 % actual 'lost' figure.

Why the customer didn't get a 'we tried to deliver' card remains a mystery. Maybe they did and it got lost or maybe the postie didn't have time to write it / ran out / forgot to bring them / had no pen / couldn't be bothered / left the packages in his cart and just hands them in at the end of his route to save time.

Mike

[guccij]

We've seen a higher than normal number of orders go "missing" since the snows at the end of November/through December.

My hunch is this: yes, there is still some mail waiting to be sorted, believe it or not. Plus, some dishonest people take advantage when they know there are problems and claim for non-delivery when they've received it all along.

We get Royal Mail's operational bulletin every day, which is a detailed pointer to what's going on where, even down to specifying delayed flights. We send the relevant day's to people who moan, also the certificate of posting which we obtain for every single item.

And I agree with Mike, there are many occasions where people haven't received a card through the door (or say they haven't), then we get their uncollected item back about a month later.

The biggest complainers are those who select Second Class mail. They always want their stuff the next day for some reason.

We're sticking with Royal Mail because like you, we are probably our local sub PO's biggest weekly customer and we value them staying open! We frank normal mail in the office, but give all recorded and Specials to them so they're getting £00s from us a week.

[BPJ553]

We have a similar dilemma - do we or do we not send everything recorded. So far low cost items go unrecorded. We charge a average rate £1.99 for low cost items. if the value is over £25 it goes recorded. On average we have to re-send approx 10 unrecorded items per week do to them being 'lost'. (Nearly all ebay sales btw..) too much work to claim on insurance but overall the small profit we make on the un record postage covers the losses of the missing items and our royal mail costs are lower. Might be an odd way of looking at it but we are actually slightly better off this way.

[BPJ553]

Oh, and in a more direct reply to your original question about the ethics of leaving - I think that depends on how successful your business is.

In my opinion the more successful the business the more ethical you can be.

If this few £1000's per year is not significant then more power to you and you have my respect.

But if it is significant - well, I don't think you have the luxury of damaging your business while propping up some one elses. Sorry.

[Fairyglass]

Having digested the discussion, spoken with our current staff, and looked in more detail at our spend, we're going to leave the local office and set up a direct account. We're about to move to an industrial unit, and the money we save will pay a packer's basic wage, allowing me more time to manage the elements of the business I should be managing, not taping up boxes. I reckon that four years' support for the local post office has to be enough, and it's time to look after our own business first.
Time will tell if the losses alter using this service- we'll probably go for the tracked option on all items over £10 or thereabouts. I hope that if there is some backlog somewhere it's sorted quickly, but it seems to me that rather than one big pile of post in a warehouse there's probably many small piles in corners of sorting offices. There's lots of discussion and information on the net for those interested.
Thanks for all the replies, it's good to have objective opinions from others in similar situations.

[Donna Kempster]

Hi I have to re-iterate Mike's comments. Our loses are much more like 0.1%. The one thing I will mention is is there a return address on your packets? Like Mike we get lots of people who enquire where their parcel is and we find that the majority of these are at the local sorting office. When a parcel does go 'missing' we usually find that the majority of these are returned to us as not collected. Our return address prints on the label which makes it very easy for the post office to return to us. There was def. a delay in delivery during the snow but this seems to have cleared from our perspective.

Once you go onto an account and have a daily collection you def. become on the radar of the local sorting office and service levels (returning non delivered items etc) improve. We had a day in the snowy weather where we got a cluster of complaints of non-arrivals from one days despatch and the local delivery office investigated for us whether bags had been misplaced.

We have found that tracked is really expensive compared to what we have lost. We use recorded for items over a certain value and the 70p is less than the tracked rate.

KR Donna