It’s in the post. Or is it?
Have our postmen suddenly stopped delivering interesting mail? An unqualified “yes” seems to be the answer from PriceWatch readers, who have contacted us in recent weeks to complain that while bills and junk mail can be delivered without difficulty, the parcels and presents that they look forward to are struggling to get through.
E-mail and texting have dramatically reduced our dependency on paper correspondence while at the same time increasing the volume of parcels being carried through the postal system, as the more tech-savvy take to the internet to order cheaper books, games and electronic equipment from outside Ireland.
According to An Post there has been an increase of 14 per cent in incoming international mail packets over the past two years. Much of this growth is being generated by internet business of one kind or another, as well as by the rapid increase in Ireland’s ethnic diversity.
But, according to readers who have contacted PriceWatch, instead of dropping off these bargain parcels as it is being paid to do, An Post is increasingly dropping off lightweight delivery notices detailing an often remote sorting office where the heavy mail can be collected.
Having paid expensive postal charges, people are annoyed to find their parcels diverted to these sorting depots with inflexible and sometimes inconvenient opening hours.
One reader who lives “bang in the centre of Dublin city centre” has given up buying things from the internet because, he says, they don’t get delivered. “An Post only brings a card saying I can collect the item from their office. I was home every time they called and they made no effort to get in touch. I’ve no idea how to contact them about this,” he wrote.
Another reader also living within spitting distance of Dublin’s GPO now has everything delivered to work instead. “An Post has never tried to deliver a parcel to me, always leaving their collection card instead - and worse than that, twice (that I know of), they actually returned parcels to their original senders, with a sticker saying we no longer lived at this address. In both instances, I hadn’t received any notification of attempted delivery.”
Whether you get your parcels or not may be down to a geographical lottery. “We recently moved from Dublin to Kinvara, Co Galway,” wrote another reader. Before her move, every time she ordered something, “An Post would not attempt delivery but merely shove one of those cards in our postbox. Since I was not working, I was always at home.”
She says that having to walk or take a taxi to the pick-up depot for parcels was a “major inconvenience”, but since her move west every single large and small parcel has been “delivered with a smile” to her doorstep. She is now convinced that An Post has a pick-up policy in Dublin which forces people to make trips to get their own parcels.
“When one considers how much shipping costs are and that it is a postal employee’s job to deliver any item, it is utterly ridiculous,” she says.
An Post is insistent that no such pick-up policy exists and is quick to absolve itself of responsibility for the proliferation of delivery cards being left in lieu of deliveries. It claims it is “fully committed to delivering all domestic and international mail provided it is correctly paid and properly addressed”.
An Post says that delivery notices are left only after actual delivery has been attempted.
“We are sorry that some customers have been inconvenienced through direct experience of this procedure not being followed,” a spokeswoman told PriceWatch.
“We have a policy of investigating all such incidents providing specific details are brought to the attention of our customer-services team.”
The spokeswoman also accepted that the opening hours of its collection offices “won’t suit everybody” but said it was “simply not feasible to provide collection facilities around the clock”.
She said the company was developing a new initiative to allow it to offer customers “more flexible mail collection and delivery options in urban and rural areas. Lifestyles are changing and we are determined that it’s essential that our services keep pace with customer requirements”.
The Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg), which regulates the postal industry in Ireland, recently published results of its annual report on the quality of service performance of An Post, and it’s clear it is not just our readers who have issues with the service on offer. ComReg found that 72 per cent of standard correspondence throughout the State was delivered within one working day - some way adrift of the 94 per cent target it had set. It also found that 97 per cent of all mail is delivered within three working days, against its target of 99.5 per cent.
Commenting on the report’s findings, ComReg chairman Mike Byrne said an improvement in the quality of the service was “fundamental” to An Post’s well-being. He welcomed its public commitment to improve the quality of service provided, but said its performance “continues to be unsatisfactory”. He added that “much remains to be done and continued leadership will be necessary to reach an acceptable quality standard for the benefit of all postal consumers”. Speaking after the report was published, Ann Fitzgerald, executive chairwoman of the National Consumer Agency, echoed Byrne’s concern and said she viewed the “poor service with concern”. She said consumers “deserve a fair service for their An Post products in return for the price they pay”.
An Post would be well advised to pay heed to these warnings and to the complaints about its poor parcel-delivery record, as the future is looking tough enough as it is.
The European Commission plans to introduce a directive from January 2009 to open up the postal market to competition and new companies will almost certainly enter the newly liberalised markets to cherry-pick profitable services. Whether or not the delivery of parcels is one of the cherry-picked services remains to be seen.
•To contact An Post, call 1850-575859 or see www.anpost.ie
I’m waiting for a delivery of a book I purchased over a month ago. It dispatched within two days. The tracking details provided show Royal Mail putting it on a plane and it has now disappeared into the black An Post hole. Privatisation is the only answer.
Comment by ColmF | June 18, 2007 at 5:50 pmI lived in Dublin for a while, and my postman had a very interesting thing to say about this. He claimed that An Post no longer employed dedicated parcel delivery staff in [his depot] area, and it was now expected that letter-delivery postmen were to deliver parcels. If they couldn’t carry the parcel on their bicycles (!), they could leave it up in the depot in the “cage”, and maybe some other postie might try to deliver it if they had taken the car into work that day, and were driving past etc.
Mind you, he may have been under some duress — at the time, I was expecting 3 parcels which were a week overdue, including a wedding present and an award, and I wasn’t happy at all.
On top of that, an acquaintance living nearby was once told by depot staff that a missing parcel containing a kid’s birthday present had probably been “lifted” (ie. stolen) from the depot, after she went up with the delivery docket.
Things certainly are not going well in [this district]. After that, I tried to avoid using online shops that would deliver using An Post until I moved house out of the area (a few months ago).
By the way — I find it notable that one of the top items on An Post’s “Frequently Asked Questions” list is: ‘Why did the postperson not knock on the door?’ Sounds like it’s asked pretty frequently, then…
Comment by Justin | June 19, 2007 at 3:01 pmA Dutch friend posted a spinning wheel to an Irish friend of mine on 30/05. she tracked it until 5/06, when it was ‘in Ireland’ This morning (20/06) she received it back saying it had been ‘refused’.Interestingly, the Priceline sticker on the parcel, with the 4 reasons for nondelivery, had not been ticked by An Post. However, my Irish friend had phoned her local sorting office in Dublin last week and been told that it had never arrived. There was someone in her house all the time, and no notification was received that delivery had been attempted. She certainly did not refuse delivery, as she wanted this item. The Dutch post office have requested a copy of the Pricewatch article in order to refund my friend the 30 euro postage. We will be making an official complaint about this to An Post. Roll on competition. My Dutch friend was actually here in Ireland in the meantime, giving a workshop to Feltmakers Ireland, and she was compiling a list of suppliers for them before she left. One of the principal feltmaking suppliers in Holland will not take any orders from Ireland because of the unreliability of the postal delivery at this end. He says he has lost too much money on Irish orders. How are we Irish textile workers to get supplies at a reasonable cost if we are on ‘blacklists’ through no fault of our own?
Comment by Maire Ni Neachtain | June 20, 2007 at 1:42 pmI would very much like to send a digital scan of the above mentioned form by Mrs. Ni Neachtain so as to prove the point that delivery at the adress in Dublin has not even been attempted. Even if I get a refund of money I will not get my time and effort back - no more business with Irish post for me!
Comment by Monika Auch | June 21, 2007 at 12:52 pmIt has been a while since the last entry but I want to tell you my tale anyway. On Oct. 31st my spanish gilrfriend’s mother who happens to work for correo (the spanish an post) mailed a bunch of officially translated copies of my girlfriends’ college education which also included her original diploma. it was sent registered express delivery as we were urgently waiting for this stuff to arrive. when the parcel (a standard cardboard tube) hadn’t arrived after a week we tried to track it and also rang correo and we were assured that the parcel indeed left spain a few days after it was mailed by my girlfriends’ mother. so i went to the an post website and tried to track the parcel there and lo and behold: the website stated that the tracking number didn’t exist. my girlfriend rang an post and since she doesn’t speak perfect english she got just a dismissive comment saying that correo probably has lost it since it wasn’t checked in in ireland. upon ringing correo again they again assured her that the parcel has left spain on the 4th of november. so i rang an post since my clean english didn’t allow for discrimination and indeed a friendly service man explained me that the parcel should have been checked in in ireland within 3-5 days and no, it was impossible that the parcel got lost at the airport during check-in as everything went through a big machine, which in return was dismantled and checked after each working day. also all the planes were scrutinized after each delivery so that nothing could have gone missing. he added, as if to prove his claims that an post handles millions of incoming international items every day and that this would make it impossible for anything to get lost..
he advised us to wait another day and file an investigation with correo as nothing could be done in ireland because the parcel could not have gotten here undetected. 2 days later we still hadn’t received anything and nothing was registered in ireland under out tracking number. i did have time to think about the enthusiastic words of the call agent and i became suspicious about the alleged infallible conveyer belts of an post.. so i rang an post again just to be confronted with a very grumpy service rep who basically didn’t agree with my careful questions and doubt about how likely it may be for an item to get lost between the might wheels and conveyer belts of an post. fairly rudely he told me that these belts are like the word of god and i felt i was close be burnt at the stake of the holy inquisition of an pope.. post itself. anypost, we am still waiting and if the implications weren’t so dramatic it would have been just a silly side notice but my girlfriend lost all her educational life, missed a deadline for an important application. furthermore we are now confronted with the possibility that she will have to return to spain as her career opportunities equal zero for almost two years (apparently it takes one year for the spanish authorities to replace her documents). and she also lost at least €400,- worth of translated documents not including the costs she is facing for having all her papers replaced. reading through all the trouble an post is causing to people i am beginning to have concerns about the awareness of an post that some the parcels letters and parcels they are handling are extremely important and valuable beyond their material cost. careers, relationships and reputations are being entrusted into the hands of postal services. I am so disappointed with an post and its recurring cheap and dismissive excuses.
Comment by Thorsten Kahlert | November 12, 2007 at 8:37 pmI’ve had it with An Post Junk mail coming in my door. This morning there were four identical Perlico leafleats lying on my floor and two requesting people to come back to the Rosary.
Comment by Robert Reilly | June 12, 2008 at 12:16 pmI am reliably informed that An Post charges per leaflet for delivery of this junk. Perlico et al take note.