Going even postaler (is that a word?)

Those of you who read my rant about the UK's alleged post office system, known as "Post Office Ltd" will know I'm not its greatest fan.

And now more than ever.

As if things with the post office system here aren't bad enough, it's been announced that some 2,500 branches (of 14,000 post offices nationwide) will be closed by the powers that be. And that's in addition to the closure already completed of some 4,600 post offices. The closing of this huge  number of post offices will result in some 45,000 jobs lost.

Which means to users of the post office system much further distances to travel in order to get to a post office, much longer queues, and staff over-worked even more than they currently are, by having to do the work of all those 45,000 workers who lost their jobs.

And the problems are already showing.

But you'd never know it to look at the way Adam Crozier, Royal Mail's chief executive, pay packets. Oops, sorry, Mr Crozier makes more
money than a simple pay packet can hold so he's paid by cheques or more likely by Direct Deposit into one of his bank accounts. You see,
according to "The Telegraph", "Last month, state-owned Royal Mail revealed that directors' annual pay, benefits and bonuses leapt from £4.3 million to £7.3 million." More specifically, it reported that "Mr Crozier received a total package of almost £1.3 million, up 16 per cent." What a lovely reward for what is in reality a dismal failure.

It's also a slap in the face of every post office worker and all the Postman Pats and Pams when you consider that Crozier's pay increase was
almost 10 times the 2.9 per cent awarded to other staff in the year to March 2007.

And it's especially a despicable act when you consider that Crozier's company, the Royal Mail, saw profits fall by a third, despite its effective monopoly over postal services. Now that's not just a newspaper's supposition, In May, the government produced its response to a public consultation on the post office network and said that changes were necessary to counteract losses which had risen from £2m a week in
2005/06 to £4m a week in 2006/07, all under the watchful, but useless eye of its chief executive, the terribly overpaid Mr Crozier.

With profits in the pan and going in an increasingly downward spiral, what does that overfed feline corporate idiot do? Why he authorises a very expensive TV advertising campaign.

According to The Independent, "They've gone full-on with the casting. There's John Henshaw from 'The Royle Family' doing his usual; there's a nice Northern Mum, a perky young Asian assistant in a suit and a shiny-eyed Billy Budd apprentice. The script is tremendously Northern Camp in the Alan Bennett/Victoria Wood/ Coranora manner.

"The manager has called a morning meeting because he's had an epiphany. "Are you all right now, Ken?" "Never better, Amir."

"Then he sees the light – meaning the lovely traditional Post Office light outside, which prompts a very odd exchange in a mix of Blair-speak and marketing-speak: "That's not just a logo – we have more than a brand – we have an institution... we have the trust of the nation because we are the People's Post Office".

"The People's Post Office"?!?!?!!?

Oh give me a fuckin' break!

This wouldn't be the same "people's post office" which now has posters all over its walls, starring that same Henshaw touting everything but postal services. To wit, car insurance, telephone service, mobile phone top up cards, currency conversions, travel insurance, life insurance for the over 50s, broad band Internet service and god knows what all else (here's a partial list of what else). And then at the bottom of one of those self-same posters, Ken says, "and oh by the way, we still do stamps."

Nice to know what I've been saying all along is now admitted by the idiots running the "postal service", and that is that postal services (IE taking care of the people's postal needs) is the last thing on their agenda.

Our "postal service" needs a root and branch refit. It needs to focus on serving the postal needs of the nation. I don't care if in rural communities they want to maintain the cosy country general store atmosphere. But in the cities and towns they need to leave the banking to the banks, the insurance coverages to the insurance companies, the phone and Internet products to the communications companies and so on, and just handle our postal needs.

Maybe then people won't go (in those few areas of the country where available) to the alternate companies now providing competition. Which is of course not competition, because these alternate companies provide postal services only (or primarily). It's time the Royal Mail's post offices did the same. And they need do so sooner, rather than later.