What is happening to the Post office?

When I lived in Scotland the post office was in WH Smith until the shop closed down. The P.O then transferred to a totally unsuitable shop that was cramped, cold and miserable. The staff were miserable too and I don't blame them.
Where I live now we have a P.O. inside a Londis store at a nearby petrol station. It is open from 7am- 8pm 7 days a week and I honestly cannot fault it

Posts like this makes me realise how lucky we are in our small Somerset village/town. Our local post office is spot on, the postmaster and staff are brilliant and they also run an incredibly well priced gift shop on the premises. We try to use the additional services they provide as it makes the branch a viable business for them. I genuinely appreciate how lucky we are.

The PO in our local market town has closed, leaving us with a branch in the supermarket and a tiny branch in the Spar at the petrol station which closes whenever they have a delivery to deal with. A far cry from the days when my grandfather was a sub-postmaster and we had two deliveries a day and one on Christmas morning.

I live in a v small town in N Derbyshire. We used to have two POs but the main one closed. However, the other "took over" and offers a fantastic service 6 days a week, most helpful staff. I am treasurer of several local organisations and use them a lot since the last bank for miles closed. The main organisation is our u3a where many members still use cash for transactions, even though I do most other things like paying bills online. I recently had a u3a member pay her annual sub with a postal order!! There are also POs in neighbouring small towns and villages, some inside local grocery shops, and they perform a vital service in an area with dire public transport.

Long live the post office!!

The United States Postal Service used to be run by the government and they were losing millions, if not billions of dollars annually. It eventually went to a PRIVATE agency within the executive branch of our govt.

It seems to be hanging on by their nails, with plenty of price increases for postage. With electronic and social media, the old fashioned snail mail is struggling everywhere. At least we have employees working the windows. It’s still a trusted service.

Although it goes to show you that the government cannot always run an enormous agency like that efficiently. Had to turn it over to private buccaneers. 🤞🏼
USA Gundy

Not much use having a PO counter in next village if you have no personal transport. When everything started to go wrong several years ago I searched the internet to discover that once fragmented, different parts of the former public postal service were long scattered. What most people mean by the post office is a place with counter service that also takes parcels. This deteriorating "service" is a company with one shareholder - ONE! connected probably to a government department. The main objective is to reduce costs, not provide a public service. This is why the policy is to allow formerly independently run post office when the owners retire to close, unless a local business will provide premises to house a new one. In villages, this is often not possible, and even, now in small town centres.

THIS is happening to the Royal Mail/ Post Office It is true they are prioritising parcels over the actual mail I am sure there is a legal obligation to deliver the mail/letters but they are not doing it ! I am waiting for some quite serious mail and wondering if it will arrive ever? www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d30227ea-bbe1-407f-a98d-081ab1bdd075?shareToken=87be1d37280890a473426f7dcab3cbaa

I live in a medium sized, northern, market town. There's a post office near me with a lovely big sign saying it's open 9.00 - 5.00 every day except Sundays.
The queue is always long, often out of the door, even outside of the obvious busy hours. The next nearest Post Office is a train ride away.
It actually opens at 10.00am and closes at 2.00pm most days. Sometimes it doesn't open at all. There's never a notice to warn you. Sometimes the assistant just has to close leaving the queue outside as her shift is over for the day.
There's generally only one person on the counter and there's a very high turn over of staff. Most don't last more than a week or two.
There's a permanent notice up asking for applicants to work there. The owner, if in, is never on the counter and generally very loud and rude to customers and staff. He really seems to enjoy looking over the assistant's shoulder and loudly repeating personal details when customers collect benefits, withdraw cash or apply for passports etc.
The building itself is tiny, dirty and the shelves, which only contain a couple of packets of envelopes and a few postal boxes, have sharp corners and quite dangerous.
It's not a good place to be.
And now all the local banks are closing, stating the post office is going to transact their "in person" business in future!

You wouldn’t expect decent service from an immoral, lying, vindictive outfit which wrecked the lives of hundreds of post masters and have resisted justice for them for years.
The Horizon affair is the worst injustice in this country’s history. An absolute disgrace.

I worked in a post office for a few years. The remuneration from Post Office Ltd, who postmasters are at the mercy of, is minimal, pennies per transaction. Every office is subsidising the post office with their retail offering. If people don't use the retail side, then the post office will close. POL have lost contract after contract to provide government services and are shifting towards a primarily PUDO, pick up drop off, service using Amazon and Evri etc.
The upshot is use the shop or lose the post office.

P.S. Post office don't have anything to do with your mail beyond receiving it. Royal Mail are responsible for delivery (or not) and the pricing.

It is the very senior managers who are; an immoral, lying, vindictive outfit which wrecked the lives of hundreds of post masters and have resisted justice for them for years.

not the rank and file posties and sorting office management.

I have recently discovered a local post office in Praze-an- Beeble, in Cornwall in a newsagents/ shop. The staff are lovely, the service is efficient and they are open all hours. They deserve to do well, with Post Offices closing and restricting hours. We used to travel miles to find one open then find they were shut for lunch or the service was bad. The good ones seem to have closed long ago.
The hours the staff put in in this Post Office / shop is remarkable now a days, long may they continue.

Our post office used to be in the back of Heron Foods. Well, before christmas I carried a heavy parcel from the car park only to learn that it had closed down! I had to carry it back to the car and head for a small village post office. I would also like to know what is happening to these post offices as well. No post office in our local town centre is ridiculous !

I totally understand what you mean. It costs me £12 return to get a taxi to a post office which is in a general store. We don't even have an ATM machine nearby so when drawing cash out everyone in the shopping queue knows how much money I have now got in my bag so I never feel safe until the taxi collects me.

All the banks have been closed so I am now having to pay by card and so do online banking but I need the cash for taxi fares and they add quite a lot of money to the fare because of card payments. I thought having to pay extra to use your card was illegal but apparently it isn't.

We are living in a world of technology first, second and third, thank goodness I am computer literate at 81 years of age.

Ilovecheese

Callistemon21

After the dreadful scandal when post office operators were wrongly prosecuted, some committing suicide, others going to prison and not all receiving compensation as yet, I'm surprised anyone wants to do the job.

The most dreadful miscarriage of justice and no-one yet held accountable. The wrong people went to prison.

Quite so, would you really want to work for the post office now, knowing what the management did.

I’m just bumping this up so people don’t forget!
“The Post Office” set up a flawed IT system, committed, purgery and maliciously prosecuted their staff. People were made bankrupt, went to prison and many died. Some taking their own lives.
Is it any surprise that we are finding it hard to have have a thriving local post office in every community.
This is a huge scandal and “heads should roll”( metaphoricaly speaking) but they won’t. The people in charge got huge bonuses and ordinary people suffered. Including us, the customers

We’re lucky to have a village post office but Royal Mail’s delivery service is atrocious, we’re lucky to get a delivery every 7-10 days 😵‍💫 Collections from the post box are now once a day at 7 am instead of twice a day.
The Post Office scandal is heartbreaking and appalling, heads should roll for the abominable treatment so many people had.

We have a post office in the shop down the road and there are rarely queues. We also have a main one in town.

Our post office closed, as did the four banks in our small market town, the hub for several villages with no shops. The P.O. is now open again in a separate shop. There are three counters but only one is open usually. They also sell stationery, greetings cards and gifts, but you can’t get in to see them as the queue blocks the way and is out onto the pavement.
There is no ATM outside, though Co-op and Sainsbury’s have one. The nearest bank is a 20 minute bus ride away.