Post Office closures

If you watched the news the other day you would probably have heard that there are going to be lots of post offices being closed due to them losing money.

Apparently, there are too many people paying bills using direct debit and paying things like car tax on the internet.

This made me wonder, why are they promoting doing everything on the internet? I would have thought it would be better for them to improve services for people to go to the post office and pay stuff, rather than for them to make these services worse and improve the services for the lazy people. If they did this, then there would be more chance of the post offices staying open and post office staff keeping their jobs, and people who don't have internet facilities would always be able to pay their bills and post stuff.

One person said on the news that going to the post office provides an opportunity to go out and meet other people and that doing everything online would mean that you are stuck in front of a computer screen for an increased amount of time. And with all this stuff about people getting too fat and unhealthy etc I thought it would be good to promote the idea of going to do stuff at the post office.

Also recently in my local newspaper there was something about people who pay their BT telephone bills in cash at the post office. Apparently, lots of people who do not have bank accounts, or who do not want to set up direct debits (this seems to apply to alot of pensioners) and who have been paying their telephone bills at the post office for many years, are now having a £4.50 charge for doing so.

Am I also right in thinking that you can no longer get television licenses from the post office?

It's no wonder they are loosing money if they are doing things which can only put people off using post offices.

It's not quite as straight forward as it might first seem. The reason many things like the TV license cannot be purchased from the Post Office any longer is because the license to provide this service came up for renewal and they (the government) pulled the plug on it so the Post Office actually lost the contract to handle them. The same is true of the Passport checking service they used to do which I used last time I renewed mine and thought it was an excellent idea.

And the reason for the excess charges to pay bills over the counter now is a similar reason. The Post Office now has to pay a charge for accepting cash to pay bills, so they have to pass this charge on to the customer.

Don't blame the Post Office. Blame our crap government!

And the reason for the 2000+ Post Office closures that are due to take place isn't because of a drop in customers due to reduced use. That is just the media trying to hype something that is not true. The reason for the closures is because of the postal system being opened up to tender a couple of years ago and Royal Mail now making much less money because 75% of their total revenue is generated from business customers, not the general public posting stamped mail, and companies like TNT and businesspost have stolen a lot of Royal Mail's business customers. Therefore less revenue coming in means less money to run smaller branches of Post Office.

So again, blame our government for handing the mail system out to tender. Why they did it is stupid. Royal Mail is a government owned company so in effect they short themselves in the foot doing it. The argument is that putting it out to tender leads to competition driving down prices, but this is only true to business mail. The other companies are not interested in personal general public stamped mail because there is no money in it. Royal Mail have never made money from this mail. Their money has always been made from business mail with the money from stamped mail just contributing towards revenue. But now the business mail is dropping off and going to the opposition the stamped mail cannot pay all Post Offices to stay open.

So... BLAME THE GOVERNMENT!!!

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Originally Posted by Stephen Coates

One person said on the news that going to the post office provides an opportunity to go out and meet other people and that doing everything online would mean that you are stuck in front of a computer screen for an increased amount of time. And with all this stuff about people getting too fat and unhealthy etc I thought it would be good to promote the idea of going to do stuff at the post office.

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The post office experience for me involves standing in a queue of about 8 people, none of whom really want to be there, with no common interests and no intention of talking to each other. Taxing the car at the PO involved having to find all the documents, trekking down to the PO and queuing. Took about 3/4 hour. The internet method takes <5 minutes so in the remaining 40 minutes I can do something else. I don't think that makes me lazy, rather I can make more productive use of my time. Other bills I don't even need to think about sorting, just read them when they come through to check I'm not being fleeced and then file them away in the knowledge that the DD will sort things out.

Harrison is right. The reason that Post Offices are no longer making money is due to the government removing more and more of its services thus giving people less reason to use the Post office. The government then use this as an excuse to either close Pot Offices or sell off Royal Mail. It's yet another example of privitisation by the back doorby a so called socialist government. Maggie Thatcher would be proud of them.