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As for delivering parcels they will have a realignment so sundays part of your duty or when theres vacancies they will employ people on new contracts where sundays are normal pay like they already do . Plus they dont get paid breaks and dont get paid for household deliveries.
Where do you get your £2 per parcel from on a Sunday? Most delivery drivers are capable of delivering 10 an hour, even covering the rural routes, and I doubt we're paying staff £20+ an hour on a Sunday?
It's interesting that RM feel parcels can be profitable when Evri still manged to lose £77m last year from a £1.46 billion turn over and Yodel had to be bailed out by new owners after nearly going into Admin. Only DPD seem to be profitable in the UK.
Parcels on their own aren't profitable. Ask Evri or Yodel!
Bear in mind Royal Mail prices for non-contract Tracked booked online are virtually the same, and for 1Kg-2Kg parcels actually cheaper than Evri. Undercutting a company that's making a loss. That'll work!
If you saw how many staff we have in on Sundays vs how many parcels you'll see it can't be profitable. RM are paying around £2 for every parcel to be delivered in staff wages alone. These items cost the public from £3.99 to send. Of course we don't know how much the likes of Moonpig are being charged but it'll be considerably less.
You won't find any other courier paying drivers £2 an item.
As an aside, the amount of Amazon parcels we see at our office has dramatically reduced. Either they've employed more drivers, they're sending less out or they're using other carriers more.
A couple of days ago it was mentioned on here about staff numbers. Since the new year we've seen an influx of new starters and, looking at the website, there are still a lot of vacancies for posties. It hasn't been like this for years. My theory is that a decision was made nationally to reduce numbers by natural wastage and see how far they could go assuming the government would agree to a reduced USO service. That hasn't happened so now they're going the other way. My office alone has seen a 10% increase in staff since the new year and, last time I looked, there were still four vacancies listed on the recruitment site. We're still at lower levels than pre-pandemic though.
We've also had that rare phenomenon of mangers prioritising letters recently due to poll tax bills and electoral voting cards coming through. Funny how they can get the letters delivered and leave packets when they want to. I guess the publicity of delivering these late would be too much even for Royal Mail's press team to handle with their lies about rotating rounds etc.
Overall, I expect USO quality of service to finally start going up in 2024/25. It's too late for this financial year and there will be another fine coming up when Ofcom get around to it. It's just a question of how much but it'll obviously be more than last year's fine as the figures haven't improved at all this year.
Whistl's £600 million lawsuit won't happen until late 2025 now so that's money RM will ignore for another year. They're confident Whistl will lose but they were confident Whistl would lose the cases they won so that's reassuring!
And then there's the self-employed Parcelforce driver's lawsuit coming up. Again. other companies have lost similar cases but RM are confident they'll win. I wouldn't put money on that.
Time 2 kill - But at least redeploying those staff to deliver parcels on the 6th and probably 7th day will be a lot more profitable than having them traipsing around delivering 1 letter to every 3rd or 4th house on a round.
Strange that our sorting office closes 2pm Saturday 'so @ 1 pm we have to make sure all parcels are delivered and return any undelivered letters
OFCOM have already suggested that moving to a 5 day USO could save RM £200m/£250m? Not sure RM will save the full 20% of potential staff costs savings as they'll still have to pay people to deliver parcels etc on the 6th day of the week.
Pumpky, it's good to hear that your office is delivering letters every day. Unfortunately not all areas can make this claim therefore the offices that cannot deliver letters every day due to staff shortages or sick leave must be making huge savings?
New starrter"Didnt realise have to work every Saturday Flat rate"Today 73 parcels plus letters 9 hours 'We deliver letters every day:
Bug changes are coming whatever .
The cwu would agree to 1 day reduction dave ward said that but any other days might be phased in .
The impact of any change to the USO will be very significant in terms of resource required.
Currently, because we deliver over 6 days but staff only work 5, we need to employ 6 people to cover 5 deliveries on some rotations, 4 people to cover 3 deliveries in others. These additional duties (day off covers) won't be needed if USO drops to a 5 day week. If it went to every other day (very unlikely indeed imho) you could probably expect a 40% reduction in resource requirement.
So, for every 1,000 full time deliveries we currently use 1,200 full time staff... 200 of these would effectively become surplus if the USO goes to 5 days. Sure, some of these may be vacancies so it won't be 200 redundancies, but it will be a reduction in overtime costs of people covering those vacancies.
Put simply, a USO reduction would be worth a fortune to RMG.
Dowsie, "I’m pretty sure if IDs delivered letters 1 or 2 days a week it would make massive savings I think ofgom said if ids went down to deliver letters 3 days a week the savings would be up to 650 million pounds a year".
I'm not seeing a massive reduction in staffing levels locally despite the reduction in daily letter deliveries so presumably the staff are busy delivering parcels?
Nice to see a positive finish to the day.
Reducing the days they deliver letters will bring massive profits cos there will be a big reduction in staff Also they will be delivering more parcels Including sunday delivery.
I have just sent a small birthday card via Moonpig. Postage £2.70
Oli I’m pretty sure if IDs delivered letters 1 or 2 days a week it would make massive savings I think ofgom said if ids went down to deliver letters 3 days a week the savings would be up to 650 million pounds a year
I would hope that the group would post a small profit however any profit posted by GLS will almost certainly be offset by the losses of the UK operation?
I don't believe that the cost savings associated with only sending letters out once or twice a week will bring the UK operation back into profit plus it looks as though Solystic have held Seidenberg's feet to the flames over the parcel machine contract which Thompson tried to stop midway through the process?
Always be positive the sp will go up again they are going to post a profit come may I no alot of the changes there making and particularly the savings there making .