Dear Royal Mail,
I know you're not a person but an institution, though I'm hoping you'll be able to reply to this email as if you were a person.
I met a man a few years ago who had previously worked for a company that made envelopes for junk mail. That is, when you receive a piece of junk mail it sometimes comes in an envelope that has promotional rubbish printed on the outside of it, eg. "PRIORITY: OPEN URGENTLY! YOU'VE WON A PRIZE!" someone has printed this envelope. And he told me that the direct (aka junk) mail company for whom his company printed envelopes aimed for a 2% response rate.
So let's take this apart. Somewhere in a rural location is a factory, employing local young people on temporary contracts, printing envelopes. These envelopes are transported by lorry to another place, where they meet up with the innards of the junk mail, trucked from somewhere else, and the envelopes are packed and posted. Royal Mail, I understand, has a separate and HUGE logistical system dedicated to the distribution of direct mail. So the post is posted, sorted, distributed and delivered.....
And 98% of it travels directly from the letter box to the rubbish bin or, if we're lucky, the recycling bin. And just think how many people are earning their livings from this 2% efficient system! Wow....
My local post office is about to close. This is a bad thing. Could you not just franchise out the generation and posting of junk mail to the scores of local post offices, to keep them afloat? Each office could manage the distribution of rubbish to its neighbourhood, and the targeting of rubbish deliveries could be much more refined. Customers could actually visit the post office and help the staff to target the rubbish at those people whose recycling bins have a bit of spare space in them. The post office would still exist for those ageing types who quite fancy picking up their pensions and posting a few letters to their loved ones, despite the underlying futility of this activity. And the rubbish could make a smoother transition from factory to bin, while saving on the massive overheads associated with running big distribution plants in the countryside.
Ah, joined up thinking........
If you'd like to hire a consultant at vast expense to help you deliver this deliverance solution product, please do not hesitate to contact my associate,
Yours,
Andrew.
2 comments:
Perhaps the local post offices could instead have huge billboards on the outside, thus generating income from the companies who would normally post their adverts? Anyone interested could then pop in to the post office and make enquire the old-fashioned way...
Looks like they didn't listen to me. Now they're shutting, striking, privatising and demanding superhuman walking speeds. The post offices that are left have such enormous queues that someone (like me) who hates queueing is more likely to find an alternative way of doing things instead of going to the remaining POs. So they've franked their coffin, I suspect.
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