Postal Services

It’s pretty easy to have a rant about the postal service. Whichever country you are in, they seem to lose parcels, take ages to deliver and generally seem incompetent. It’s not always their fault though I suspect.

I watched this weeks Panorama on the BBC about the plight of the Royal Mail and there incessant in fighting. I shan’t begin to take sides on that debate and I feel for all those concerned who have the job of sorting out that particular mess of a company. What did stir the imagination though was the way in which all the packets and parcels that are sent still have to be sorted by hand. I didn’t realise it was still the 1920′s!

Postal Problem

For anyone who didn’t see the program, the basic premise was that because small parcels are all irregular sizes, no machine is able to sort them out. These are the sorts of packages every e-commerce site sends out, every mail order company and pretty much anything sent via the mail which isn’t a letter.

Now the Royal Mail has been handling small parcels and packets since it’s first inception. Nothing new about all that and they have successfully been doing it for many years. What no-one could foresee though is the effects of the internet and more importantly the popularity of the web and buying online has had on the postal service.

More Packets Than Ever

Cast your mind back just 5 years perhaps. How often did we all buy on-line? Not very often if at all would be the most common answer. Most of use can probably still remember signing up for eBay for the first time and certainly no-one had thought of doing their weekly food shopping online. (Not that that goes through the post but it illustrates the point)

So in the last 5 years, the amount of things bought online has doubled, tripled, quadrupled and, I don’t know the word for five times (pent folded?) but whatever it is, it’s a big change. And there is no way that the Royal Mail, or any other postal service for that matter, would have increased their capacity to deal with this type of post by the same factor.

What To Do

So the result is, they can’t cope. They can’t cope in sorting it and they can’t cope in delivering it. And that is compounded by the fact that every country is suffering in the same way and the major hubs around the world are basically becoming gridlocked.

So what can be done other than spending a fortune on more staff and doubling the cost of posting? The answer has to be to standardize the shapes in which all packets should be sent. Now I appreciate that will need many different sized boxes, and a lot of boxes will be half empty as the goods inside would be wider than they are log for example. But assuming that postal tariffs would be partly on box size and partly weight based, it would I guess be fine. Really obscure packages could still be sorted by hand but these would be few and far between.

The Result

In doing this, the postal services can mechanize the sorting of packages in the same way as they do for letters. And if all postal services worldwide stuck to and agreed these sizes, post would flow far more effectively from country to country. Especially at times such as Christmas where volumes become astronomically inflated.

This costs savings would be huge and the service would improve as well. I can see no other solution to this problem which, let’s face it, is only going to get worse and worse each year no action is taken. All comments are welcome!