Royal Mail is becoming the laziest company in the UK

There are few modern irritations worse than coming home to discovering a “sorry, we missed you” delivery receipt on your doormat. Queuing at a collection point feels incongruous in a world where most daily communications have shifted to email, and hundreds of thousands of products can be delivered within hours of an order.

And presumably the queue will only get longer, now that Royal Mail has drastically reduced its opening hours just two hours a day at about half of its customer service points. What exactly does your staff do the rest of the day? And how, precisely, is someone whose job involves showing up at an office, warehouse, or factory supposed to pick up the items from her?

Royal Mail is leading us towards a do-nothing economy, and until that changes, we won’t get out of the current zero-growth rut. Forget the 24/7 culture we were once supposed to be navigating to. The lockdowns put an end to that: even a Labor MP has claimed that Royal Mail is using the Covid pandemic as an “excuse” to cut hours and force people to go online.
In Victorian London, you could send a letter in the morning and receive a reply in the afternoon. Technological innovations will always lead to creative destruction, with traditional practices being replaced by new and better alternatives. But it’s still surprising to know that many Royal Mail collection points will open their doors from 8-10am Monday to Friday.

It’s not like this is a thriving business. After a series of strikes last year, Royal Mail racked up losses of more than a billion pounds, and its share value has halved in the past five years. If your management would like an idea to turn things around, maybe they could try opening collection points for more than ten hours a week? Getting the basics right would surely be more effective than changing its name to International Distribution Services, which was the last big idea. In May, it was reported that the company was late delivering more than one in four first-class letters, its worst performance on record.

However, this latest development speaks to a broader malaise in the British economy. The assumption now is that we work from home, at least for part of the week. And many do: a recent analysis found that more Britons are working from home than in any other country except Canada. In France, employees spend 0.6 days a week at home; here it is 1.5. For civil servants or human resources professionals, it may be convenient to take a 9:00 am ride to the local pickup point. But we can’t just serve WFH administrative workers while supporting everyone else in a position where they can’t juggle professional life and personal administration. Many people (hairdressers, bricklayers, truckers) cannot work from home.

In many industries, Britain’s work ethic has been eroded by lockdowns. For starters, it wasn’t great. We may have spent years mocking the French for their 35-hour weeks or long lunch breaks, but even before the pandemic we were only working, on average, an extra 0.2 hours per week. The fantasy land of “free” money created by our response to the pandemic has led to the illusion that work must fit our lives. No nation can prosper under such pretexts.

We need a significant reset. Self-employment, flexible work, the gig economy – they all have a place in our modern workforce. But one must still assume that Britain works 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. Services must conform to that standard. As a result, we would be wealthier, more productive, and probably happier, even if we still couldn’t pick up a package.