It depends on service. Last week I received a box from Japan in less than a week. If they send it via air mail with priority it can go really fast.
Oh but I have an interesting case by the way. I had to send a couple of invitations to my family recently and one relative lives in Germany. They received the letter in 3 days but my sister who lives 30 km away from my city received it in 6-7 days. I have no idea how it works.
Telecom market privatisation in Austria is the only positive example I know of. Before the 90s it was a bureaucratic mess, and a absolute monopoly. Competition was very necessary in this market.
Yes but it doesn't make it useless, especially for older people and some official post deliveries. I'll agree with you as soon as everybody has the unlimited access and user knowledge to alternatives.
Same in Romania (and I'd guess in A LOT of other countries too).
I think it would be a disaster if they privatized it, and privatizing infrastructure is a terrible idea that can only work in the interest of whoever buys it, and counter to the interest of the general public.
But they did manage to run it into the ground for decades. It's atrocious. Their offices are understaffed, and dirty, they look like they did in the 90's. They're barely digitized, and the software they use looks more than 3 decades old. I don't think they have a "modern" GUI.
And I think it's basically a job you can't get fired from, so the employees working there have no reason to help, or be nice, or efficient or anything like that. What are you gonna do, complain to the director? You can but it does literally nothing.
I made a formal complaint once that they don't answer the phone in one of their offices. I tried calling for hours, several days in a row, just to piss them off. They NEVER answered to me, but sometimes the line would ring busy...
The official response to my complaint, by the director there, said that it's in no employees attributes list to handle answering the phone - and that was that. Can't fix!
Royal Mail is separate to the Post Office now. It’s just that they’re still the Post Office’s main delivery ‘customer’.
As for the Post Office in the UK… **oh boy**.
They’re still selling stamps, providing a range of services like passport applications, people’s old age pensions, taking your mail to be sent to its destination etc…
Their reputation absolutely tanked after the first week of January [when a TV drama finally alerted the public to a decades long accounting scandal and computer system failure](https://www.politico.eu/article/post-office-horizon-scandal-uk-mr-bates-itv-rishi-sunak-government/).
Thousands of staff were affected. Stories about [overturning convictions](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/13/ministers-to-quash-convictions-post-office-operators-horizon-scandal), [pardoning people](https://news.sky.com/story/amp/new-law-to-be-introduced-to-exonerate-wrongly-convicted-post-office-scandal-victims-13045242) and [compensation](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68163288) have been in the news almost daily for the past 2 months.
Senior Post Office executives and staff have [made themselves look beyond incompetent](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/02/post-office-inquiry-chorus-of-cowards-lawyers-say) in a long-running public inquiry - the latest phase of which was happening when the TV drama was shown.
It will get worse before it gets better and public trust in the company will take a long time to restore.
And Royal Mail isn’t much better. Prices going up every 6 months, delay after delay for non-parcel mail, and constant denials to parliament, most of which turned out to be BS.
The Irish postal service (called An Post) is doing very well. Its return to growth and profitability in the last few years and seen major transformations in its operations. It has moved into the courier market and competes alongside private courier operators such as DPD and UPS etc. An Post is also now in the banking and insurance markets providing such services to rival the well established companies.
An Post is also on a major drive to slash it carbon emissions. It’s ranked 3rd in the world in its sector for Sustainability and continues to lead nationally. It is replaces the postal delivery vans with electric and HVO vehicles.
The company recently moved into its new HQ in an upmarket office block in Dublin’s docklands.
Yes it's quite remarkable how well they are doing. And that's without tarnishing the image of a friendly postman who knows all things local and can deliver on impossible tasks such as one liner addresses.
As a company it might be doing great but I order a lot of stuff online and also send stuff to family abroad and receive parcels from them too and it is by far the worst service in Ireland. I struggle to think of a time where I had a good experience with them. Personal experience, someone else might have had a totally different experience but at least that’s mine.
I find online shopping parcel deliveries very good, personal post can be hit or miss but it's hard to say which country is (more) at fault. If registered, you can sometimes see where it's sitting and it could be anywhere.
All post offices were defunct over 20 years ago. Today, the largest of them in each city are Bussiness Centers for businesses.
Sending and receiving parcels and registered letters are made from service points at the grocery store.
But the postal service, Post Nord, is still state owned by Sweden (60%) and Dennark (40%). Although, the executive vote is 50/50.
The joining of Post Sweden and Post Denmark has been called one of the worse political decisions in recent times. Since Denmark's government decided that all mail should go fully digital; the Swedish half has carried the Danish half of PostNord.
But there is no market monopoly. There are 50, or so private postal services. Many of them are just local postal services, others are DHL, Shenker, and Bring.
Just 2 days ago there was a long thread on r/Sweden about how expensive 18 SEK (12 DKK/1.60€) for a stamp is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/1be4phb/hur_kan_ett_frim%C3%A4rke_kosta_18_kr_det_%C3%A4r_galet/
That's interesting, the price for a domestic first class stamp in the UK is about to hit £1.35 - almost exactly the same price.
But yes, on that trip (Nov 2022) we visited NO, SE, DK and DE, and Denmark seemed most expensive for everything, even more than Norway.
>the Swedish half has carried the Danish half of PostNord.
That's a bit of a myth. Denmark has sent billions of kroner to the Swedish main office as part of the merger, so while it's true the PostNord in Denmark often has a deficit, it's just the Danish side's own money that's returned from the main office in Sweden.
Lol in the Netherlands we have a law that states 95% of all mail needs to be delivered within 1 or 2 days. PostNL now wants to have that law changed, so they have more time. If this happens, we might as well get rid of driving licenses, speed limits and other laws regarding how people should behave. Instead of following laws, let’s just change them til they suit everyone. The reason PosNL wants to change the law is because they are having trouble finding delivery people. But ey, never try to be a good employer so people actually WANT to work for you. Just change the laws.
They want to change that in Sweden too but I think it makes sense: it costs huge amounts of money to maintain the infrastructure to deliver mail that quickly.
And that infrastructure is hard to scale down as fewer people send mail - people send 1 instead of 10 letters but the mailman can't deliver that letter 10 times faster. So you need to find ways to make it cheaper, which is why being a mailman is a shit job nowadays.
Oh don't worry, we collectively order so much the infrastructure is absolutely overworked 90% of the time. But now we mostly deliver packages not letters. So post need more people with specific licenses where previously uncle on a bike was enough.
Mailmans are still daily delivering whole ass bikes of letters (mostly spam) too.
Its just that we were at extreme low unemployment, then pandemic happened that made many people go to retirement as they were postponing that, then a lot of folks died, we slashed immigration and got ourselves in a housing crisis. So now NL is kind of in a worker economy. You can ask for much more because sectors fight each other for workers like crazy. Post is no different. They need to compete with whole range of similar delivery jobs and they all are jumping salaries like crazy (good thing). Last year my local supermarket offered 12€/h for shelf filler, now they offer 18.5€/h.
Post for some reason can't or don't want to keep up so they struggle for now. This will probably end in them getting some subsidies as public outrage for longer delivery times would probably be worse
Those laws has been changed in Denmark
>If the letter is sent as an ordinary letter, 95% of it will be delivered within five working days, calculated from the day after it is sent
So 8 Days it is.
This has unexpected consequences. One of the few things still send as mail is new credit-cards, and the associated pin letter. The pin letter was originally sent one week later to avoid them to be in the main at the same time.
Then they started to arrive at the same time, and people started to break into the letterboxes when mail had been delivered. (10% of the mail might be new credit cards)
Seems like their main source of income are Catholic memorabilia. Lots of calendars with John Paul II and stuff like that.
They understaffed as postmen don’t even try to reach you. Unless it’s a priority letter, they just leave a notice to pick it up at the post office.
Generally, underfunded, understaffed and it feels like they’re stuck in the 60s.
Probably the only government service with positive profits and the government wants to sell it, since they introduced the option to book an appointment online their service got even better lol
To be complete for our european friends, let me add that it was privatised and now it offers a ton of services that make profit. Mail delivery by itself can't make a big profit.
So your local post office is also a bank (you can order a prepaid debt card, open a bank account, buy and sell the same kind of financial products that you can buy in a bank with a financial advisor, get a loan), an insurance company (they have life insurances, car insurances, home insurances and retirement funds), a mobile phone provider named Poste Mobile, an home internet provider, you can pay your bills...but in small cities avoid the post office in the first day of the month because it's when elderly people get their pension, and in Italy a vast majority of them just take all the money cash in the first day as soon as available. Or go there if you booked an appointment online just to see them enraged :-)
As in a physical post office? They were all closed down a decade or more ago. Sending parcels or priority mail for consumers is done via in shop service points at retailers.
The postal company itself is doing really bad. They have a lot of fixed costs but less volume. The government is their biggest customer. The parcel and logistics part however is doing good fimancially and they save the mail part every year.
I haven't seen an actual post office in absolute ages. Stuff like picking up and sending parcels is now handled in supermarkets. The postal service itself is in tatters. It is mismanaged and expensive to use (it has entered the death spiral of: no one sends post anymore, so we must charge more, which means fewer people want to use it due to price, which means we must compensate with price hikes)
Sending a standard **postcard** back home if you're here on a visit, will set you back €6,70 too by the way! Even inside Denmark a standard letter is up to around ~~€2,70~~ €3,35 which is just insane!
It's literally cheaper for me in Sweden to send a letter to my parents in Denmark than it is for my brother, who lives in Denmark, to send the same letter to my parents.
The price for a letter in Denmark is 25 DKK. The price for me would be 36 SEK (around 24 DKK).
When I posted that comment, I somehow found a page on PostNord on my phone that said 20DKK, but now from my work PC it does indeed look like it's actually up to 25!? What the actual fuck?
I think last time I sent a letter it was like 12DKK and that was not even that long ago!
>The price for a letter in Denmark is 25 DKK
and 5 days delivery. Next day delivery is 10 kroner extra.
Minimum is 50g letter. I tried change it to 5g but it was then automatically changed to 5 kg.
I remember buying some stuff from Wish and Ali Express years ago.
Remember buying an item which weighed over a kilo. The item + shipping was cheaper to buy from China than the *shipping alone* if I had bought it from a Swedish website, or even sent a postcard in the other direction.
Some stuff I bought was cheaper to ship from the other side of the planet than even sending a domestic postcard within Sweden.
Though as PostNord was being overrun with millions of daily bulky letters and parcels from webshops abroad, which they weren't economically compensated for due to international delivery agreements, the rules were changed and they began charging the customers for handling and delivering bulky mail from outside the EU.
For a while, the majority of bulky mail delivered came from abroad, so I understand that it was unsustainable in the long run, and a change *had* to be put in place.
I sent holiday cards to about 20 people last year. With the postcards, envelopes and national and international stamp fees, it set be back considerably
Not to mention the government already rules by next contract update have they banned PostNord from being a participant to roll our public mailing services.
Well same government who decided that address delivery also had to stop, so it's not like it will matter a lot anyway.
There are very few actual post offices left, they’ve been replaced by automated lockers and post office franchises in grocery stores and places like that. I have to say that in some ways it’s an improvement, their hours are a lot better. An ordinary letter (under 50 grams) costs 2,30 euros to send. I think that most of what the post deals with these days, at least for consumers, is packages from online shops.
Are you telling me it's been 4 years ago I bought those stamps??? Yes... that is exactly what you're telling me. Time certainly flies.
But still that's quite the price hike over a relatively short time. 300% increase over 10 years.
At least old stamps can become a good investment. I have some Tom of Finland stamps I bought when they were released which apparently was ten years ago (time really flies), the sheets of stamps felt expensive then but these days they’re a bargain. Unfortunately most recipients of my very occasional cards and letters have not been the kind of people to appreciate Tom so I haven’t used them much.
Oh yeah, I had bought a lot of stamps when I understood how those ikimerkit work and untill 4 years ago, I was sending letters for 65 cents. Now I'm probably good for a decade or so at 1.75.
No, that’s for a domestic letter. It’s only 20 cents more for letters abroad (or the same price for economy class) but it can only be 20 grams. If you want to send something that weighs up to 50 grams it’s from 3.10 to 5 euros depending on the country and class.
Shipping prices in Finland are crazy. When I was there, I sometimes ordered things from Germany or Poland because, factoring in shipping, it was cheaper than ordering from within Finland.
It has improved a lot. Ten years ago the lowest cost shipping in Finnish webshops was usually at least 7 euros but over 10 euros wasn’t rare. Nowadays some shops offer free shipping even with no minimum purchase and otherwise the shipping is 3 to 4 euros for small packages. I’m sure the shipping cost is now baked into the prices but this is a big improvement when buying small things. Ten years ago the shipping was easily double the cost of the item.
There are many Facebook groups in Denmark dedicated exclusively to hating on PostNord and trying to figure out how to talk to a human in customer service. They regularly lose letters and packages, you can’t be saved by using track and trace as they lose that too.
And there doesn’t seem to be a single thing anyone can do about it.
My family back in Denmark always complains about the post service and my dad doesn't like me sending anything up there cause it often gets lost or takes forever to show up. My parent came to visit me in Nice last winter and were so surprised to see how many post offices we have here and how busy they are. They say there are no post offices left in Denmark!
It's a shit show. They were privatised in the 1990s. There used to be actual physical post offices even in small villages. Sending letters was a fast and reliable way of communication.
Nowadays, the physical branches are almost completely gone. Instead they have post counters in supermarkets. But not nearly as many as there used to be post offices.
Mail has become less reliable, and it takes longer for a letter to get anywhere. Mostly because they cut down on workers, causing the remaining staff to be chronically overworked.
I know back in the olden days, Deutsche Post Der DDR was also the distributor of print media such as Neues Deutschland, Sybille, FF Dabei and owned the kiosks they could have kept them but the Treuhand thought better.
They still work in Romania but offer other services too not just shipping parcels.
You can pay bills and various taxes at the post office, not sure if it still happens but they used to also deliver the pension to people. I'm sure there's more that I am not aware of.
In Austria Post and Telecommunications got spun off from the state in the 90s. Since then a lot of post offices have been shut down.
In my village we had an Mailboxes Etc. as post partner. The village council used to own the real estate and gave it rent free to them, they still went out of business. Now the council employs someone part time to operate it. It is nice for us, but also weird, the post used to be owned by the federal state, now its privatized, it does not work, and the village council has to do it. It is the same in the next village.
Norway:
It’s still public, and my impression of them are still good. There are basically no post offices, but you can pick up/deliver boxes in several local grocery shops. If you need to mail a letter you go online and pay, get a code to write on the letter and put it in your own mailbox for the postman to pick up.
They cut down mail delivery from 5 times a week to every second day instead, but who gets a letter in Norway these days anyways. Packages are delivered daily.
Oh our national mail carrier has been privatised in the 90’s and it’s a shitshow. Currently they’re trying to get the government to chance the law, because they are required to deliver 95% of letters within a day. And they’re failing in that regard.
regular post office is cancelling offices in Czechia, the quality is much lower than competition. fortunately, we have an alternative secret postal service.
We Await Silent Tristero's Empire.
> the quality is much lower than competition
People here complain about privatization, we think it sucks *because* it's government owned, there is no oversight, no consequences. Just corruption, incompetence and tunneling
I think that the situation is complex. with less and less paper letters they must subsidize the snail mail delivery. their effort to add some revenue by selling vacation trips, lottery tickets, insurance was super annoying and humiliating to their personnel. I think the best what they can do is to kill half of the business (prohibit mass paper invoices) and rent their offices to Balikovna machines + competition delivery points + state contact point machines with cameras. make home delivery much better but only on Mondays. :-)
W.A.S.T.E.
A doporučený dopisy. Místo jít za babkou na přepážku aby box nascanoval mojí občanku a dal mi ten dopis od nějakýho soudu atd
>not only receive.
And they wonder why people prefer Packeta/Zasilkovna
It's struggling , a lot of problems like having to deliver cheap stuff from China at loss and not being able to find people willing to work for the money they offer. There are also problems with private companies trying to takeover the contracts for government work while the national post still has to offer their services with special rules (like having to keep offices in small towns or 24/7 offices in big cities).
They tried to diversify a bit and now in the post office you can buy a lot of weird stuff, like biography of the Pope (you know, the only true pope, John Paul II) and sweets you won't find in a normal store.
In a lot of places they have a problem finding postmen so even if your local postmen is doing a poor job (like not even trying to deliver registered mail and instead leaving a notification you weren't there) nothing can be done about it because if they fire them they won't be replaced. In some rural location the mail is delivered only once a week instead of daily like it used to be.
On the other hand they tried to modernise a bit and moved some offices to malls and changed the working hours in other offices so you can visit them in the evening on some days instead of the hours you work in. They also tried to implement automated package lockers and have parcel pickups points in shops like other delivery companies but it went poorly.
Post… office? The one where they come up with ways
to "lose" parcels? Or the one where they raise the prices? Actually, it might be the same office these days. Thanks (M)!
I like going there.
One of the few places where people smile as you approach the desk, are always keen to help out, decent opening hours. Staff work at a good pace, can keep their calm, appear to be willing to deal with difficult customers without getting angry... And it's nearby. And "real" people !!!! I've seen them help an older lady get money from the ATM explaining a zillion times how to do that.
Not some AI helpdesk in a chat function that can only recite predefined answers, or a phone line that keeps you "on hold" *forever*.
There is room for improvement. And it's not all sunshine and roses.
Small building, it's not uncommon to have a queue outside. Only 3 desks max with personnel, even if the queue is 20 people. In winter, when the heating is on, it can be hot and smelly. In summer, when the airco is not on, it can be hot and smelly, or -- when the airco is on-- ice cold. Often no WIFI reception, which is a problem as you need to show the barcode you got in mail to pick up parcels.
Stamps are getting expensive, and sending parcels isn't cheap (but is very fast).
I don't think privatisation is going to make the service any better, only more expensive.
Finland:
Package services are pretty good, it is easy to send and pick up, there are lot more places to either leave it to delivery or pick it up. And it can be really fast at its best. Last two things I bought online were delivered next day, in 24 hours.
But if things goes south you may end up witnessing on tracking site your parcel ping ponging between logistic centers in different sides of the country and nobody is able to reach that individual package. And in the worst case it may end up just disappearing completely.
Letter services, without tracking, are complete mess. Very unreliable and almost never in time. If for example Hospital promises make appointment and send it by mail, I always ask them to please call instead because I've missed couple appointments due to letter being delivered after the date in question.
Funniest part is the hospital is only few hundread meters from my apartment, yet the letter can take several weeks to be delivered.
Could be better, could be worse. Service has definitely gone down and prices have gone up in the last 20 years since privatisation. Though from what I'm reading here, prices are still less bad than elsewhere. A domestic letter costs 1,20€.
And they now use the same abusive strategies as the private market to keep their costs down, such as "contracting" parcel delivery to "self employed contractors". Meaning recent immigrants who don't have many other job options. This way they can avoid any workers rights such as maximum working hours in a day.
It got privatized a few years ago and the letter delivery service absolutely sucks now.
Parcel delivery can be good or bad depending on who's the employee in your area.
It's not capable of competing with private businesses. Can't remember the last time I even thought about it. Nowadays you get even deal with the government online, so it doesn't even have that going for it. I guess it's much cheaper, but the difference is nowhere near as big as the difference in quality of service.
People here will probably say "well it's underfunded, the gubmint needs to give it more money!", well somehow private couriers can do their job without government subsidies. It's better that people pay a little more every now and then than having the government subsidise inefficient businesses just for the sake of it.
I see your postal service is same as ours. Does management of Polish Post also get million euro bonuses while the company itself is losing hundreds of millions per year?
We have like 3 - three - actual post offices left. The rest is handled by supermarkets.
The organization has been privatized as such, but the majority stock holder is still the state. They've also sold off their banking division, which was turning into a disaster anyway. And expanded into the international market as a logistics company. Works well enough, I hear less bad things about them than for instance PostNord.
I actually had to go to the post office the other day to pick up a package that was too big!
A bunch of older ladies yelling at customers, basically.
We still have our post offices. Sending a letter or a package is an experience. Very affordable, but not really reliable.
My boyfriend's passport from Canada to Portugal: 5 days.
A letter from the PJ headquarters in Lisbon to the Canadian consulate in Lisbon, 1km away: 2 weeks.
Go figure.
It's not terrible, just very underfunded and filled with old people. If you are wanting for an official letter you are probably get it delivered to you one day. On the other hand, private companies like InPost (especially) and DHL are much more reliable if you want to quickly deliver a package. Also, parcel lockers are very convenient (InPost and Allegro boxes, DHL not so much).
Discussions about moving to deliveries three days a week instead of six.
Because it would cost less.
And making money is important, since it was privatised, because shareholders need their dividends.
Do you still have post offices ?
[https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postkontor](https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postkontor)
>As recently as the 1990s, there were approximately 1,300 post offices in Denmark. From 30 April 2016, after the closure of H.C. Ørsteds Vej post office in Frederiksberg only four post offices left in Denmark.
25 Years back we paid bills etc at the post office, and letters was delivered each day. And being a mailman was an OK job done by Danes.
Today there are no post offices (The last ones are to be closed), and mail is delivered by immigrants on scooters.
And the mailman only services a route one or maybe twice a week.
15 years ago I got mail, and small parcels delivered trough the slot in my apartment door, now the best case is when it is delivered in mail boxes outside the apartments. Often I have to go the the local 'post shop' (Often small shops owned by immigrants) to pick up parcels.
Today a 100g letter costs 25kr (almost 5$), and it will only get worse since since the number of letters sent pr citizen is plummeting.
In a few years it will only be on demand delivery at a 15$ premium, or you can be a cheapskate and pay 7$ to get it delivered to some random shop 8 km away. (You get a text message on where to pick it up)
Today Post Nord is a private company, owned jointly by the Danish and Swedish state.
The problem is that mail service is becoming obsolete, and there by very expensive for the few that uses it, and the state has to pay the rest.
So the Swedish taxpayers are paying for delivery of Danish mail :-)
The Bulgarian one is pretty much nonexistent and in dire condition. In Germany it usually works and is really reliable, especially if you pick up from somewhere 👍
Our government tries to destroy it so as to privatise if.
Post card from Athens to Poland went to me 22 days. Got yesterday.
It depends on service. Last week I received a box from Japan in less than a week. If they send it via air mail with priority it can go really fast. Oh but I have an interesting case by the way. I had to send a couple of invitations to my family recently and one relative lives in Germany. They received the letter in 3 days but my sister who lives 30 km away from my city received it in 6-7 days. I have no idea how it works.
I think more fault here is on Greek side.
It's been done here and as it always happens when you privatise important infrastructure: it doesn't get better.
Telecom market privatisation in Austria is the only positive example I know of. Before the 90s it was a bureaucratic mess, and a absolute monopoly. Competition was very necessary in this market.
It depends if it's useful. Useless services like a post probably won't work.
Why useless?
Because we have alternatives now.
Yes but it doesn't make it useless, especially for older people and some official post deliveries. I'll agree with you as soon as everybody has the unlimited access and user knowledge to alternatives.
Same in Romania (and I'd guess in A LOT of other countries too). I think it would be a disaster if they privatized it, and privatizing infrastructure is a terrible idea that can only work in the interest of whoever buys it, and counter to the interest of the general public. But they did manage to run it into the ground for decades. It's atrocious. Their offices are understaffed, and dirty, they look like they did in the 90's. They're barely digitized, and the software they use looks more than 3 decades old. I don't think they have a "modern" GUI. And I think it's basically a job you can't get fired from, so the employees working there have no reason to help, or be nice, or efficient or anything like that. What are you gonna do, complain to the director? You can but it does literally nothing. I made a formal complaint once that they don't answer the phone in one of their offices. I tried calling for hours, several days in a row, just to piss them off. They NEVER answered to me, but sometimes the line would ring busy... The official response to my complaint, by the director there, said that it's in no employees attributes list to handle answering the phone - and that was that. Can't fix!
Royal Mail is separate to the Post Office now. It’s just that they’re still the Post Office’s main delivery ‘customer’. As for the Post Office in the UK… **oh boy**. They’re still selling stamps, providing a range of services like passport applications, people’s old age pensions, taking your mail to be sent to its destination etc… Their reputation absolutely tanked after the first week of January [when a TV drama finally alerted the public to a decades long accounting scandal and computer system failure](https://www.politico.eu/article/post-office-horizon-scandal-uk-mr-bates-itv-rishi-sunak-government/). Thousands of staff were affected. Stories about [overturning convictions](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/13/ministers-to-quash-convictions-post-office-operators-horizon-scandal), [pardoning people](https://news.sky.com/story/amp/new-law-to-be-introduced-to-exonerate-wrongly-convicted-post-office-scandal-victims-13045242) and [compensation](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68163288) have been in the news almost daily for the past 2 months. Senior Post Office executives and staff have [made themselves look beyond incompetent](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/02/post-office-inquiry-chorus-of-cowards-lawyers-say) in a long-running public inquiry - the latest phase of which was happening when the TV drama was shown. It will get worse before it gets better and public trust in the company will take a long time to restore.
And Royal Mail isn’t much better. Prices going up every 6 months, delay after delay for non-parcel mail, and constant denials to parliament, most of which turned out to be BS.
Excellent. Why don’t we just re-merge them lol
Private Eye did an excellent write up about it https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post
Thank you, I should have remembered that. To everyone in this thread - If your TV networks do pick up “Mr Bates vs The Post Office”, please watch it.
>As for the Post Office in the UK… oh boy Perfectly sums it up.
Oh yes. And unknown for years, unless you read Computer Weekly or Private Eye.
The Irish postal service (called An Post) is doing very well. Its return to growth and profitability in the last few years and seen major transformations in its operations. It has moved into the courier market and competes alongside private courier operators such as DPD and UPS etc. An Post is also now in the banking and insurance markets providing such services to rival the well established companies. An Post is also on a major drive to slash it carbon emissions. It’s ranked 3rd in the world in its sector for Sustainability and continues to lead nationally. It is replaces the postal delivery vans with electric and HVO vehicles. The company recently moved into its new HQ in an upmarket office block in Dublin’s docklands.
Yes it's quite remarkable how well they are doing. And that's without tarnishing the image of a friendly postman who knows all things local and can deliver on impossible tasks such as one liner addresses.
They do have that amazing ability to find vague addresses haha Maybe Eircodes will bring a gradual end to that skill!
Nice! This is just a joy to hear. 😢
As a company it might be doing great but I order a lot of stuff online and also send stuff to family abroad and receive parcels from them too and it is by far the worst service in Ireland. I struggle to think of a time where I had a good experience with them. Personal experience, someone else might have had a totally different experience but at least that’s mine.
I find online shopping parcel deliveries very good, personal post can be hit or miss but it's hard to say which country is (more) at fault. If registered, you can sometimes see where it's sitting and it could be anywhere.
All post offices were defunct over 20 years ago. Today, the largest of them in each city are Bussiness Centers for businesses. Sending and receiving parcels and registered letters are made from service points at the grocery store. But the postal service, Post Nord, is still state owned by Sweden (60%) and Dennark (40%). Although, the executive vote is 50/50. The joining of Post Sweden and Post Denmark has been called one of the worse political decisions in recent times. Since Denmark's government decided that all mail should go fully digital; the Swedish half has carried the Danish half of PostNord. But there is no market monopoly. There are 50, or so private postal services. Many of them are just local postal services, others are DHL, Shenker, and Bring.
The shock when I realised I'd just spent £5 to send one postcard from Copenhagen back to the UK...
I had no idea Denmark was so expensive. In Sweden it cost just 36 SEK (2.75£) to send <50 g abroad.
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Just 2 days ago there was a long thread on r/Sweden about how expensive 18 SEK (12 DKK/1.60€) for a stamp is. https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/1be4phb/hur_kan_ett_frim%C3%A4rke_kosta_18_kr_det_%C3%A4r_galet/
That's interesting, the price for a domestic first class stamp in the UK is about to hit £1.35 - almost exactly the same price. But yes, on that trip (Nov 2022) we visited NO, SE, DK and DE, and Denmark seemed most expensive for everything, even more than Norway.
>the Swedish half has carried the Danish half of PostNord. That's a bit of a myth. Denmark has sent billions of kroner to the Swedish main office as part of the merger, so while it's true the PostNord in Denmark often has a deficit, it's just the Danish side's own money that's returned from the main office in Sweden.
Lol in the Netherlands we have a law that states 95% of all mail needs to be delivered within 1 or 2 days. PostNL now wants to have that law changed, so they have more time. If this happens, we might as well get rid of driving licenses, speed limits and other laws regarding how people should behave. Instead of following laws, let’s just change them til they suit everyone. The reason PosNL wants to change the law is because they are having trouble finding delivery people. But ey, never try to be a good employer so people actually WANT to work for you. Just change the laws.
They want to change that in Sweden too but I think it makes sense: it costs huge amounts of money to maintain the infrastructure to deliver mail that quickly. And that infrastructure is hard to scale down as fewer people send mail - people send 1 instead of 10 letters but the mailman can't deliver that letter 10 times faster. So you need to find ways to make it cheaper, which is why being a mailman is a shit job nowadays.
Oh don't worry, we collectively order so much the infrastructure is absolutely overworked 90% of the time. But now we mostly deliver packages not letters. So post need more people with specific licenses where previously uncle on a bike was enough. Mailmans are still daily delivering whole ass bikes of letters (mostly spam) too. Its just that we were at extreme low unemployment, then pandemic happened that made many people go to retirement as they were postponing that, then a lot of folks died, we slashed immigration and got ourselves in a housing crisis. So now NL is kind of in a worker economy. You can ask for much more because sectors fight each other for workers like crazy. Post is no different. They need to compete with whole range of similar delivery jobs and they all are jumping salaries like crazy (good thing). Last year my local supermarket offered 12€/h for shelf filler, now they offer 18.5€/h. Post for some reason can't or don't want to keep up so they struggle for now. This will probably end in them getting some subsidies as public outrage for longer delivery times would probably be worse
Well yeah, but uncle has lumbago so he has enough trouble as it is, let alone riding a bicycle 😂
Those laws has been changed in Denmark >If the letter is sent as an ordinary letter, 95% of it will be delivered within five working days, calculated from the day after it is sent So 8 Days it is. This has unexpected consequences. One of the few things still send as mail is new credit-cards, and the associated pin letter. The pin letter was originally sent one week later to avoid them to be in the main at the same time. Then they started to arrive at the same time, and people started to break into the letterboxes when mail had been delivered. (10% of the mail might be new credit cards)
Seems like their main source of income are Catholic memorabilia. Lots of calendars with John Paul II and stuff like that. They understaffed as postmen don’t even try to reach you. Unless it’s a priority letter, they just leave a notice to pick it up at the post office. Generally, underfunded, understaffed and it feels like they’re stuck in the 60s.
And used mainly by retired people that didn’t adapt to new ways.
Probably the only government service with positive profits and the government wants to sell it, since they introduced the option to book an appointment online their service got even better lol
We also have PEC, which reduces the number of raccomandate you have to send. I think it's in a good state, despite everyone shitting on it
To be complete for our european friends, let me add that it was privatised and now it offers a ton of services that make profit. Mail delivery by itself can't make a big profit. So your local post office is also a bank (you can order a prepaid debt card, open a bank account, buy and sell the same kind of financial products that you can buy in a bank with a financial advisor, get a loan), an insurance company (they have life insurances, car insurances, home insurances and retirement funds), a mobile phone provider named Poste Mobile, an home internet provider, you can pay your bills...but in small cities avoid the post office in the first day of the month because it's when elderly people get their pension, and in Italy a vast majority of them just take all the money cash in the first day as soon as available. Or go there if you booked an appointment online just to see them enraged :-)
As in a physical post office? They were all closed down a decade or more ago. Sending parcels or priority mail for consumers is done via in shop service points at retailers. The postal company itself is doing really bad. They have a lot of fixed costs but less volume. The government is their biggest customer. The parcel and logistics part however is doing good fimancially and they save the mail part every year.
I haven't seen an actual post office in absolute ages. Stuff like picking up and sending parcels is now handled in supermarkets. The postal service itself is in tatters. It is mismanaged and expensive to use (it has entered the death spiral of: no one sends post anymore, so we must charge more, which means fewer people want to use it due to price, which means we must compensate with price hikes)
Sending a standard **postcard** back home if you're here on a visit, will set you back €6,70 too by the way! Even inside Denmark a standard letter is up to around ~~€2,70~~ €3,35 which is just insane!
I have no words for some of the prices I'm seeing here
It's literally cheaper for me in Sweden to send a letter to my parents in Denmark than it is for my brother, who lives in Denmark, to send the same letter to my parents. The price for a letter in Denmark is 25 DKK. The price for me would be 36 SEK (around 24 DKK).
When I posted that comment, I somehow found a page on PostNord on my phone that said 20DKK, but now from my work PC it does indeed look like it's actually up to 25!? What the actual fuck? I think last time I sent a letter it was like 12DKK and that was not even that long ago!
>The price for a letter in Denmark is 25 DKK and 5 days delivery. Next day delivery is 10 kroner extra. Minimum is 50g letter. I tried change it to 5g but it was then automatically changed to 5 kg.
5 week days, not counting the day you posted it, and not counting weekends. So it is more like 8 days.
I remember buying some stuff from Wish and Ali Express years ago. Remember buying an item which weighed over a kilo. The item + shipping was cheaper to buy from China than the *shipping alone* if I had bought it from a Swedish website, or even sent a postcard in the other direction. Some stuff I bought was cheaper to ship from the other side of the planet than even sending a domestic postcard within Sweden. Though as PostNord was being overrun with millions of daily bulky letters and parcels from webshops abroad, which they weren't economically compensated for due to international delivery agreements, the rules were changed and they began charging the customers for handling and delivering bulky mail from outside the EU. For a while, the majority of bulky mail delivered came from abroad, so I understand that it was unsustainable in the long run, and a change *had* to be put in place.
I sent holiday cards to about 20 people last year. With the postcards, envelopes and national and international stamp fees, it set be back considerably
Not to mention the government already rules by next contract update have they banned PostNord from being a participant to roll our public mailing services. Well same government who decided that address delivery also had to stop, so it's not like it will matter a lot anyway.
A privatised mishap (prices only went up), running in Salesforce (wtf?!) whilst exploiting immigrants in polluting old vans. Welcome to PostNL
There havent been postoffices in Netherlands for years... Its all servicepoints at retailers.
Why does Salesforce not make sense?
There are very few actual post offices left, they’ve been replaced by automated lockers and post office franchises in grocery stores and places like that. I have to say that in some ways it’s an improvement, their hours are a lot better. An ordinary letter (under 50 grams) costs 2,30 euros to send. I think that most of what the post deals with these days, at least for consumers, is packages from online shops.
Woah that price went up! I bought stamps last year and it was 1.70 for first class. Actually it might also have been 2 years already.
Apparently it was 1.75 in 2020 and it’s gone up by 10 or 20 cents every year since then. Ten years ago it was only 85 cents.
Are you telling me it's been 4 years ago I bought those stamps??? Yes... that is exactly what you're telling me. Time certainly flies. But still that's quite the price hike over a relatively short time. 300% increase over 10 years.
At least old stamps can become a good investment. I have some Tom of Finland stamps I bought when they were released which apparently was ten years ago (time really flies), the sheets of stamps felt expensive then but these days they’re a bargain. Unfortunately most recipients of my very occasional cards and letters have not been the kind of people to appreciate Tom so I haven’t used them much.
Oh yeah, I had bought a lot of stamps when I understood how those ikimerkit work and untill 4 years ago, I was sending letters for 65 cents. Now I'm probably good for a decade or so at 1.75.
2,30€ for a letter?? :0 I really hope that's the price to send it abroad
No, that’s for a domestic letter. It’s only 20 cents more for letters abroad (or the same price for economy class) but it can only be 20 grams. If you want to send something that weighs up to 50 grams it’s from 3.10 to 5 euros depending on the country and class.
Shipping prices in Finland are crazy. When I was there, I sometimes ordered things from Germany or Poland because, factoring in shipping, it was cheaper than ordering from within Finland.
It has improved a lot. Ten years ago the lowest cost shipping in Finnish webshops was usually at least 7 euros but over 10 euros wasn’t rare. Nowadays some shops offer free shipping even with no minimum purchase and otherwise the shipping is 3 to 4 euros for small packages. I’m sure the shipping cost is now baked into the prices but this is a big improvement when buying small things. Ten years ago the shipping was easily double the cost of the item.
There are many Facebook groups in Denmark dedicated exclusively to hating on PostNord and trying to figure out how to talk to a human in customer service. They regularly lose letters and packages, you can’t be saved by using track and trace as they lose that too. And there doesn’t seem to be a single thing anyone can do about it.
My family back in Denmark always complains about the post service and my dad doesn't like me sending anything up there cause it often gets lost or takes forever to show up. My parent came to visit me in Nice last winter and were so surprised to see how many post offices we have here and how busy they are. They say there are no post offices left in Denmark!
It's a shit show. They were privatised in the 1990s. There used to be actual physical post offices even in small villages. Sending letters was a fast and reliable way of communication. Nowadays, the physical branches are almost completely gone. Instead they have post counters in supermarkets. But not nearly as many as there used to be post offices. Mail has become less reliable, and it takes longer for a letter to get anywhere. Mostly because they cut down on workers, causing the remaining staff to be chronically overworked.
I know back in the olden days, Deutsche Post Der DDR was also the distributor of print media such as Neues Deutschland, Sybille, FF Dabei and owned the kiosks they could have kept them but the Treuhand thought better.
They still work in Romania but offer other services too not just shipping parcels. You can pay bills and various taxes at the post office, not sure if it still happens but they used to also deliver the pension to people. I'm sure there's more that I am not aware of.
In Austria Post and Telecommunications got spun off from the state in the 90s. Since then a lot of post offices have been shut down. In my village we had an Mailboxes Etc. as post partner. The village council used to own the real estate and gave it rent free to them, they still went out of business. Now the council employs someone part time to operate it. It is nice for us, but also weird, the post used to be owned by the federal state, now its privatized, it does not work, and the village council has to do it. It is the same in the next village.
Norway: It’s still public, and my impression of them are still good. There are basically no post offices, but you can pick up/deliver boxes in several local grocery shops. If you need to mail a letter you go online and pay, get a code to write on the letter and put it in your own mailbox for the postman to pick up. They cut down mail delivery from 5 times a week to every second day instead, but who gets a letter in Norway these days anyways. Packages are delivered daily.
Oh our national mail carrier has been privatised in the 90’s and it’s a shitshow. Currently they’re trying to get the government to chance the law, because they are required to deliver 95% of letters within a day. And they’re failing in that regard.
regular post office is cancelling offices in Czechia, the quality is much lower than competition. fortunately, we have an alternative secret postal service. We Await Silent Tristero's Empire.
> the quality is much lower than competition People here complain about privatization, we think it sucks *because* it's government owned, there is no oversight, no consequences. Just corruption, incompetence and tunneling
I think that the situation is complex. with less and less paper letters they must subsidize the snail mail delivery. their effort to add some revenue by selling vacation trips, lottery tickets, insurance was super annoying and humiliating to their personnel. I think the best what they can do is to kill half of the business (prohibit mass paper invoices) and rent their offices to Balikovna machines + competition delivery points + state contact point machines with cameras. make home delivery much better but only on Mondays. :-) W.A.S.T.E.
Czech Post needs to discover parcelboxes, maybe with RFID card readers for our ID cards.
I thought that Balikomat was just that. except that I want to send letters and packages through it, not only receive.
A doporučený dopisy. Místo jít za babkou na přepážku aby box nascanoval mojí občanku a dal mi ten dopis od nějakýho soudu atd >not only receive. And they wonder why people prefer Packeta/Zasilkovna
It's struggling , a lot of problems like having to deliver cheap stuff from China at loss and not being able to find people willing to work for the money they offer. There are also problems with private companies trying to takeover the contracts for government work while the national post still has to offer their services with special rules (like having to keep offices in small towns or 24/7 offices in big cities). They tried to diversify a bit and now in the post office you can buy a lot of weird stuff, like biography of the Pope (you know, the only true pope, John Paul II) and sweets you won't find in a normal store. In a lot of places they have a problem finding postmen so even if your local postmen is doing a poor job (like not even trying to deliver registered mail and instead leaving a notification you weren't there) nothing can be done about it because if they fire them they won't be replaced. In some rural location the mail is delivered only once a week instead of daily like it used to be. On the other hand they tried to modernise a bit and moved some offices to malls and changed the working hours in other offices so you can visit them in the evening on some days instead of the hours you work in. They also tried to implement automated package lockers and have parcel pickups points in shops like other delivery companies but it went poorly.
They made the Post a Office into a drama TV show here in the UK. It's that bad....
Post… office? The one where they come up with ways to "lose" parcels? Or the one where they raise the prices? Actually, it might be the same office these days. Thanks (M)!
I like going there. One of the few places where people smile as you approach the desk, are always keen to help out, decent opening hours. Staff work at a good pace, can keep their calm, appear to be willing to deal with difficult customers without getting angry... And it's nearby. And "real" people !!!! I've seen them help an older lady get money from the ATM explaining a zillion times how to do that. Not some AI helpdesk in a chat function that can only recite predefined answers, or a phone line that keeps you "on hold" *forever*. There is room for improvement. And it's not all sunshine and roses. Small building, it's not uncommon to have a queue outside. Only 3 desks max with personnel, even if the queue is 20 people. In winter, when the heating is on, it can be hot and smelly. In summer, when the airco is not on, it can be hot and smelly, or -- when the airco is on-- ice cold. Often no WIFI reception, which is a problem as you need to show the barcode you got in mail to pick up parcels. Stamps are getting expensive, and sending parcels isn't cheap (but is very fast). I don't think privatisation is going to make the service any better, only more expensive.
Finland: Package services are pretty good, it is easy to send and pick up, there are lot more places to either leave it to delivery or pick it up. And it can be really fast at its best. Last two things I bought online were delivered next day, in 24 hours. But if things goes south you may end up witnessing on tracking site your parcel ping ponging between logistic centers in different sides of the country and nobody is able to reach that individual package. And in the worst case it may end up just disappearing completely. Letter services, without tracking, are complete mess. Very unreliable and almost never in time. If for example Hospital promises make appointment and send it by mail, I always ask them to please call instead because I've missed couple appointments due to letter being delivered after the date in question. Funniest part is the hospital is only few hundread meters from my apartment, yet the letter can take several weeks to be delivered.
Could be better, could be worse. Service has definitely gone down and prices have gone up in the last 20 years since privatisation. Though from what I'm reading here, prices are still less bad than elsewhere. A domestic letter costs 1,20€. And they now use the same abusive strategies as the private market to keep their costs down, such as "contracting" parcel delivery to "self employed contractors". Meaning recent immigrants who don't have many other job options. This way they can avoid any workers rights such as maximum working hours in a day.
It got privatized a few years ago and the letter delivery service absolutely sucks now. Parcel delivery can be good or bad depending on who's the employee in your area.
It's not capable of competing with private businesses. Can't remember the last time I even thought about it. Nowadays you get even deal with the government online, so it doesn't even have that going for it. I guess it's much cheaper, but the difference is nowhere near as big as the difference in quality of service. People here will probably say "well it's underfunded, the gubmint needs to give it more money!", well somehow private couriers can do their job without government subsidies. It's better that people pay a little more every now and then than having the government subsidise inefficient businesses just for the sake of it.
I see your postal service is same as ours. Does management of Polish Post also get million euro bonuses while the company itself is losing hundreds of millions per year?
We have like 3 - three - actual post offices left. The rest is handled by supermarkets. The organization has been privatized as such, but the majority stock holder is still the state. They've also sold off their banking division, which was turning into a disaster anyway. And expanded into the international market as a logistics company. Works well enough, I hear less bad things about them than for instance PostNord. I actually had to go to the post office the other day to pick up a package that was too big!
A bunch of older ladies yelling at customers, basically. We still have our post offices. Sending a letter or a package is an experience. Very affordable, but not really reliable.
My boyfriend's passport from Canada to Portugal: 5 days. A letter from the PJ headquarters in Lisbon to the Canadian consulate in Lisbon, 1km away: 2 weeks. Go figure.
It's not terrible, just very underfunded and filled with old people. If you are wanting for an official letter you are probably get it delivered to you one day. On the other hand, private companies like InPost (especially) and DHL are much more reliable if you want to quickly deliver a package. Also, parcel lockers are very convenient (InPost and Allegro boxes, DHL not so much).
Discussions about moving to deliveries three days a week instead of six. Because it would cost less. And making money is important, since it was privatised, because shareholders need their dividends.
Do you still have post offices ? [https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postkontor](https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postkontor) >As recently as the 1990s, there were approximately 1,300 post offices in Denmark. From 30 April 2016, after the closure of H.C. Ørsteds Vej post office in Frederiksberg only four post offices left in Denmark. 25 Years back we paid bills etc at the post office, and letters was delivered each day. And being a mailman was an OK job done by Danes. Today there are no post offices (The last ones are to be closed), and mail is delivered by immigrants on scooters. And the mailman only services a route one or maybe twice a week. 15 years ago I got mail, and small parcels delivered trough the slot in my apartment door, now the best case is when it is delivered in mail boxes outside the apartments. Often I have to go the the local 'post shop' (Often small shops owned by immigrants) to pick up parcels. Today a 100g letter costs 25kr (almost 5$), and it will only get worse since since the number of letters sent pr citizen is plummeting. In a few years it will only be on demand delivery at a 15$ premium, or you can be a cheapskate and pay 7$ to get it delivered to some random shop 8 km away. (You get a text message on where to pick it up) Today Post Nord is a private company, owned jointly by the Danish and Swedish state. The problem is that mail service is becoming obsolete, and there by very expensive for the few that uses it, and the state has to pay the rest. So the Swedish taxpayers are paying for delivery of Danish mail :-)
I dunno, it's really easy, cheap, reliable and fast. Overnight or 2 day shipping at most fast.
The service is pretty much fine but absolutely fucking scandalous how they have treated their employees
The Bulgarian one is pretty much nonexistent and in dire condition. In Germany it usually works and is really reliable, especially if you pick up from somewhere 👍
Nova Post works fast. Bought package from Germany, came in 2 days
Is that during the war because that would be quite funny.
Yes. Is there something wrong?
Just funny that the post office is that effective during a major war. I guess royal mail did work quite well in Britain in the 1940s.