Stop using your own personal experiences to talk for an entire nation of people, I send my sister postcards all the time and even buy specific stamps for them.
The mail volume is decreasing quite quickly though. Letter volume has decreased by 65% since 2010 and most of those letters are probably not from private individuals.
The national postal company recently decided to only empty postal boxes every other weekday instead of every weekday to the boxes often being empty.
Before that they also decided to only deliver mail every other weekday instead of every weekday. First class parcels are still delivered every weekday.
Sending letters is uncommon so I’m just surprised that there is a black market for stamps.
A postal service is vital for a society to function. A couple of things I’ve sent in the past few years: marriage forms to the registry office, returning old drivers’ licenses and passports, sending signed docs to my solicitor when buying a house. Less relevant - birthday cards, thank you cards, xmas cards; I think these things have a “personal touch” value which is lost in an email.
I think the prepaid business envelopes make sense when you are receiving post but private individuals need to be able to send things back without having bespoke, bulk postage deals with Royal Mail. Have noticed that employment contracts are now done with e-signatures if not in person these days but many legal docs require the same piece of paper to be signed.
Also a lot of people who do use computers! Lots of people selling their stuff of eBay or Etsy will be sending things in the post. Way less letters than the old days, but way more parcels (I think).
And yes people send way less letters now. Our national postal company has been scaling back on letters and normal posts for quite some time now. Because suprise suprise no one sends letters anymore except different governments and even then there are now electronic ways to receive those letters.
My postal agency dislikes when you send objects that aren’t small in letters for example keys. The odds are quite large that the automatic sorting machines will tear the letter open and/or the letter will get stuck in the machinery.
They take pictures of the letters as they come in from all angles, and then a computer algorithm builds a 3D structure of the letter so they know how big it is and which machines it can and can’t go through if it’s too big to go through a particular machine it gets redirected to another process. Also they have metal detectors so the keys would be detected right away.
Maybe in the '90s this was a problem with large items in envelopes but not anymore because they can detect it before it gets anywhere near the problem machine.
They have a whole list of things you can and can’t post and one of the things you can post is live insects so obviously they’re not mangling everything to an auto sorter.
Lol, is the UK like that? Where only computer people have figured out SMS, email, chat apps, telephone and so on?
Here the only letters that actual people send are the very occasional Christmas/birthday card and maybe an event invitation for something like a wedding. No one writes letters that actually tell something important. I can’t see why anyone would bother with pirating stamps.
Hell we can even send letters without buying a stamp, we can buy a postage in an app which gives us a code to write on the letter.
There may be nothing to indicate who the sender is, whereas there is always something to indicate who the recipient is. So they put a charge on the recipient if they wish to receive the letter. I don’t believe you have to pay the fine if you don’t want the letter.
Right?? You’re telling me I could have been sending JKR letters with fake stamps this whole time and SHE’D have been charged actual money for it? My new greatest regret in life is missing the timeframe where I could have done that.
They should still be charged if the wrong amount of postage has been paid.
So if you send what royal mail count as a large letter but with a normal stamp instead of a large letter stamp they will be fined and charged the difference in postage.
Only if they want the letter. If they don't want it, the postal service will gladly destroy it at no charge.
Thus, this isn't necessarily a good way to exact punishment on an unsuspecting recipient. Someone who gets a lot of fan (and hate) mail will gladly forego the small handful that don't have postage.
That's how it works. If mail isn't paid for it's made unavailable to the recipient.
I don't know how long they hold onto unpaid mail, but I assume they eventually destroy it, or open it, remove anything valuable for auction and get rid of anything else. Maybe if they're lazy, you might get something non-valuable for nothing if you know what landfill their waste goes to, but I expect they'd at least shred it.
Chances are they don't get valuables all that often because if the contents are valuable, someone's probably going to want to pay the price of postage to get it... and whoever sent it probably put the right postage on it in the first place, dodgy stamps notwithstanding, as well as a return address.
And that last part is why the policy is for the charge to go to the recipient. The postal service often has no idea who sent a letter, only where it's going.
Charging the recipient for insufficient postage has always been the policy of the British postal service. These fraudulent stamps have thus been included in with that policy because as far as they're concerned a fraudulent stamp is as good as no stamp at all.
Anything with insufficient postage is held at the sorting office closest to the recipient and a note is posted (ironic, no?) to the recipient telling them to come and pay the postage if they want it.
The reasons they've backed down this time are 1) their newfangled bar code stamps have failed to stop the very forgery they were designed to prevent, and 2) public outcry causing them (the postal service, not the stamps) to reluctantly admit that this whole thing might, maybe, uh, perhaps just a little bit, be their fault.
The only people who like the RM the way it is is the government. Everyone else would be quite happy for it to go back into public ownership. But for once they’re not actually at fault here. Charging the recipient is just how it works.
What happened here is basically the private company that took over didn’t care because they had no competition. They were also incredibly corrupt and evil which didn’t help but they also didn’t do basic maintenance and stuff on the infrastructure so everything fell apart.
It all works as long as the government actually puts money into public services but every now and then you get one that seems to think that the solution to a tiny bit of debt is to spend no money at all, on anything.
Yeah governments hate debt but don’t realise the entire world runs in debt.
You just need to manage it correctly. Further on that though, governments shouldn’t make a fucking dollar. They’re not for profit businesses they should all run at exactly zero
If they’re doing it the same as unpaid postage, paying them is still optional as a recipient. They’ll just only give you the item of post if you pay what’s owed.
I am confused how the QR code was supposed to stop forgery. I have never seen anyone scan the code at any point in the process so I don’t understand how it was supposed to help.
I’ve scanned the code myself and it’s just a number sequence. Unless you’re checking that against some sort of database, which I assume is the idea, then the existence of the number sequence itself proves nothing. But as I have said I’ve never seen anyone actually scan the damn things. I don’t even understand who’s supposed to do it.
They’re scanned by the sorting equipment. When a stamp is issued with a particular number that number can then be used exactly once, at least in theory.
They already had a perfectly good method for preventing stamps from being used more than once which was to stamp them. But sometimes they fail to do that too.
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