WRITTEN ON August 11th, 2009 BY chris AND STORED IN General

Tags: royal mail door to door, strikes

The full extent of the problems created by the latest Royal Mail strikes was laid bare today - and the bad news is it’s set to get worse.

Last month the Communication Workers’ Union announced a series of 24-hour strikes across the country over pay, jobs and services. The current round of strikes started on Friday and are due to continue until the end of this week.

Around 125,000 members have already taken part, and for those who rely on the Royal Mail’s Door to Door service (like ourselves and all door drop marketing companies) it makes for depressing reading.

Yesterday the strike hit Kings Lynn, Stanton, Bury St Edmonds, Thetford and the Ipswich mail centre in East Anglia, and Alloa, Dunfermline, Cowdenbeath and Grangemouth in Scotland.

Today workers in Stoke-on-Trent will hit the picket line, as will around 12,000 London workers on Wednesday involved in delivery, collection and driving. Bristol joins in on Thursday.

The result? Yesterday’s action in East Anglia prevented around 16,500 homes in Kings Lynn and Thetford from receiving deliveries, and in total around four million letters and parcels are yet to find their target.

As I’ve blogged before, the service provided by the Royal Mail is generally very good. The door to door service we use for our customers provides an extremely effective advertising channel for local businesses.

Strikes cause complete chaos, however. All planning goes out of the window and it becomes a firefight, a question of delivering customer items by any means necessary in order to fulfil your contract with them. It’s not helpful for anyone.

I can see more and more people turning to post office alternatives such as courier services for their parcels, and door drop distribution companies such as our own for their leaflet promotions, if only to prevent the uncertainty that increasingly seems to come with Royal Mail.