I read about the 190 electric vans that Royal Mail added to its fleet in the summer, and it’s nice to see one in the wild!
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Hello I read somewhere that back in 2013 Royal Mail was privatised, how come it’s still on the stock market? Is it safe to purchase or will my shares be bought back by royal mail as soon as I make a purchase?
It was sold of from public ownership a few years back. It is highly unlikely that the government will take it over again in the next few years.
Privatised in that sense meant it was owned by the government and then sold by the government so that it then became listed on the stock exchange.
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Must be one of the worst stocks on freetrade at the moment. Old fashioned company held to ransom by unions. Not investment advice of course but I’m staying well clear. 
I sold them when the election was called for that reason, lost a few pence, they spiked a bit after but it’s been all down hill since.
That’s the problem with Royal Mail. They deliver letters to everywhere in the U.K. that’s not very comparable with making lots of profit. They can make money elsewhere, but they’ll always have to send a 60p letter to the farthest island in the U.K. and that doesn’t make any money. They can’t not do that or things would break.
Well, that’s the case for any state postal service in any country. Most of them still manage to turn a nice profit. Royal mail is just not a well-run company.
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I have a small stake in RMG - share price is bouncing back nicely. Ex div on the 5th dec, probably offload after that date! Too risky!
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I don’t even…
Today I had to receive a tablet from Amazon. It went through royal mail. Not only did it came one day late, it also required a signature and they just didn’t bother, they just dropped it at an unwatched entrance of the building I work at.
This puts their whole modus operandi under a new perspective.
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It’s the same with any other delivery service. Doesn’t matter which one they are, at the end of the day you’re hugely reliant on the person doing to delivery to provide a good experience.
A few years ago we had a postman on our round who wouldn’t bother delivering parcels properly. If he couldn’t get them all on the van he’d have a set of clearly pre-filled “Sorry we missed you” cards prepared and post them through everyone’s door instead. Caught him at it when he posted one as I was in sight of my front door - threw some shoes on, chased after him “Hang on! I am home! Can I have my parcel?” and he had to squrim and confess it was back at the depot. Wasn’t best pleased with that.
But I’ve also not been best pleased with every courier service at some point or other. From the common experience of ‘looks like parcel was used to play hackey sack’ to ‘why would anyone think a bin is a safe place?’; delivering to a neighbour without leaving a card and marking it as “delivered to resident” so I don’t know where the heck my parcel is or who to ask for it; ignoring “No safe place, don’t leave parcel” instructions and leaving it outside the front door for thieves and scallywags to see; and my two ‘favourite’ experiences - one parcel thrown over a locked gate (don’t throw parcels, FFS!), and one parcel left not under the covered porch but behind a bush and fully exposed to the elements while it was a rainy day.
tl;dr, they’re all awful.
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I used to work at a start up that used the various postal services, we had a very poor experience with XDP who decided to throw our product over a fence into the back garden for the customer.
This customer however was in his back garden, the product you ask…? A 48kg flat pack wardrobe, clipped him but didn’t do too much damage.
Can confirm though, they’re all terrible.
@don_quixote They essentially divide the map of the world in to squares. Each square is uniquely identified by 3 words.
You select your square, put your 3 words on your parcel and it’s theoretically delivered to that “square”… Very clever is places where there are no post odes etc… Like Africa.
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what’s wrong with coordinates?
Coordinates are perfectly accurate if you get them right but it’s very easy to enter them incorrectly and very difficult to validate them. It’s easy to mistype a set of numbers and not notice. That’s even worse if you’re trying to convey a series of numbers over a crackly phone line.
Here’s an example:
53.482574354, -2.24901289
53.482574354, -2.34901289
These two sets of coordinates are identical except for one small difference in one digit. That small, barely noticeable difference puts them five miles apart so if you were using them for package delivery your package wouldn’t reach the correct destination.
Postcodes are better because they are shorter (less prone to error) and are coded so that you can validate them. If you’re expecting an address in London and the postcode starts with M1 then it’s immediately obvious that there’s an error. Coordinates don’t give you that validation unless you go look them up on a map.
The downside to postcodes is that they are neither accurate or universal. One postcode can cover 100m of road, and there are plenty of places where you might want to pinpoint but don’t have a postcode, such as private or unpopulated roads, countryside, and water. There are even entire countries that don’t have any postcodes or similar alternative.
What3Words is an alternative to postcodes that works globally. It’s main benefit is that it’s very easy to communicate; just say three clear words instead of a string of numbers. It’s designed so that similar sounding words are placed as far away from each other as possible, so if you mishear and enter the wrong words the location you get should be in the wrong country and the error becomes obvious.
The disadvantage is that you need an online connection to use it because matching words to locations is done by a central database and not by an algorithm. This means you’re stuck if you lose your phone signal. Another disadvantage is developers must pay a fee to use it.
Another alternative is Plus Codes, developed by a team of Google engineers and adopted by Google Maps. This system is about half way between coordinates and What3Words. It uses a set of letters and numbers to form a global grid of coordinates. Both latitude and longitude are encoded in a single string so you don’t need two sets of numbers, and numbers and letters that look similar are excluded from the code. E.g. it doesn’t use the number 1 because that looks too much like the letter I. The idea is to make coordinates easier to communicate and the system algorithm based so it works offline. It’s also free and open source so developers can freely include it in their applications.
They could be good for countries that don’t have postcodes. I remember when I first read about What3Words the article gave an example of a place that not only doesn’t have postcodes but also doesn’t have street names. I think it was a village in India. To get a letter delivered you’d have to write something like this as the address:
“Go South from the big tree for 300m then turn left after the house with the red door. Then walk for another 50m and it’s the house with two bushes.”
I can’t remember which country that was, but either What3Words or Plus Codes would be a life changer for their postal workers.
If they had the technology. They’d have to go around with a dedicated gps map system that could route them to these unaddressed destinations.
Not sure it would work in practice.
I saw what3words as well, but only due to the apparently insane amount of advertising money they spent getting people to talk about it.
In reality I don’t think what3words has any advantages over plus codes as you can’t rely on verbally communicating most of them anyway. Many words aren’t clear when you take into consideration accents and knowledge of language, and it doesn’t look like that was taken into consideration (presumably because it would drastically reduce the number of usable words)
Don’t get me wrong, both great ideas, and what3words has gotten better traction. But I wouldn’t rely on it verbally anywhere outside English speaking countries.
Edit
It looks like they have multiple languages now as well. Good but compounds the verbal communication problem. Apart from that. It is a useful system.
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Technology is the easy part. Every major logistics company has GPS, whether it’s built directly into the truck or in a portable device that the driver uses to mark deliveries as done. These days if you take in a delivery that requires a signature you’re presented with a mobile-phone-like device to sign with your finger. That’s a GPS device which tells the driver where to go.
What3Words wouldn’t need to be on the driver’s device though, as it already has the coordinates stored. It would be in the sorting facility where addresses are scanned and converted to coordinates.
What3words is bad for multilingual countries.
For example, libro.casa.caballo is in Mexico, while book.house.horse is in the Australia outback.
what countries are truly multilingual? If it’s on English you use English for example.
I think they realise it isn’t a universal solution which is why you can pick the language. The app I believe picks up the correct language of you scan it?