brokencross
21-Dec-08, 10:17
Just an idea, which probably has lots of flaws waiting to be zapped by Orgers, but here goes anyway.
It seems to be Christmas cards which brings this "oversize non-delivery surcharge" to the fore and the public's attention.
Maybe the Royal Mail could have a moratorium on the envelope size for a set period of time in December, say the 1st to 14th December where a normal 1st class stamp would suffice for cards which were slightly thicker than 5mm or the dimensions exceed the permitted. (Ordinary 2nd class stamps would not be granted this privilege to keep financial losses to a minimum). Obviously there would have to be a sensible limit to the excess in size to stop blatant abuse.
Once identified as having insufficient postage, these oversize items already have to be "handled" separately and manually in order to send them to sorting offices to be picked up and collected by the addressee upon payment of the surcharge.
So surely it would be just as easy to put them back in the system manually by-passing the size machine so they can be delivered along with the mail.
The rest of the year the strict size regime could be enforced.
Happy Royal Mail customers at Christmas, a good PR exercise for Royal Mail
It seems to be Christmas cards which brings this "oversize non-delivery surcharge" to the fore and the public's attention.
Maybe the Royal Mail could have a moratorium on the envelope size for a set period of time in December, say the 1st to 14th December where a normal 1st class stamp would suffice for cards which were slightly thicker than 5mm or the dimensions exceed the permitted. (Ordinary 2nd class stamps would not be granted this privilege to keep financial losses to a minimum). Obviously there would have to be a sensible limit to the excess in size to stop blatant abuse.
Once identified as having insufficient postage, these oversize items already have to be "handled" separately and manually in order to send them to sorting offices to be picked up and collected by the addressee upon payment of the surcharge.
So surely it would be just as easy to put them back in the system manually by-passing the size machine so they can be delivered along with the mail.
The rest of the year the strict size regime could be enforced.
Happy Royal Mail customers at Christmas, a good PR exercise for Royal Mail