17 October - Fraud. Pure and Simple
Two
of Britain’s oldest institutions are on a suicide mission. One is the
Conservative Party and the other is Royal Mail. Both deserve to die.
Hoping that you don’t notice, the Royal Mail is still selling through its various
agents - the Post Office being a different organisation - postage stamps which
have an expiry date of 31st January 2023.
You must either use them before that date or send them unsecured to an address in
Edinburgh. Exchanging them at a Post Office is far too simple and runs the risk
of the Royal Mail not profiting from those who don’t bother to poke them into an
envelope and probably never see the replacements.
The Royal Mail instead ask you to download a PDF form which if their extremely unhelpful Twitter
account is anything to go by is a data harvesting operation demanding your full
name and address, email address and phone number.
You can’t get the form from a Post Office and if you have a large number of
stamps a Recorded or Insured Service is recommended. Guess who pays?
It would not be possible to design a more unfriendly system if they had tried - and probably they did try.
I had already decided to stop sending out greetings cards, the postage rates are
far too expensive but I did have three 1st class and 12 2nd Class stamps left
over from last year to enable a few exceptions.
One is the Del Boy stamp you see above. The only people who will be millionaires
next year are the Royal Mail managers who devised this get rich quick scheme.
I will get my money back by not giving the postman his usual Christmas tenner. Sorry Nigel.
And I will stop sending mail. Well I pretty much have as must be obvious from
still having 15 stamps left over from last Christmas.
I can remember exactly where I was the day that the price of a stamp rose from
2½d (a penny in ‘new’ money) to 3d. It was headline breaking news. What else
has gone up 100 fold in less than a lifetime? (Err, broadsheet newspapers actually!)