Europe's postal services: France reduces deliveries, UK and Germany now outliers

To put some context for our international readers. The Royal Mail was a public company and as such had certain requirements (must give equal service) then it started making money and therefore the Tory government decided it needed to be privatised. However you can’t just say “lol half the country no longer gets post” so the newly private Royal Mail <i>still</i> has to continue this minimum service. Anyway, after privatisation, they ran it into the ground. now billionaires who don’t pay any tax (the owners of the telegraph) want the Uk to stop having a postal service because it cuts into the profit margins of the guys who own Royal Mail.<p>If they can’t provide the service they agreed to, return it to public ownership, and pay some amount towards the bail out.

The article begins with &quot;France is to move to three-days-a-week letter deliveries&quot;. That is false. It&#x27;s still 6 days a week. The default service will take 3 days to deliver letters. But they will be delivered 6 days a week.

Does anyone (outside some very rural areas perhaps) care much about mail these days? If something is important who would send it through the mail?<p>I remodeled my house a couple of decades ago and never installed any mailbox. The post office apparently returns any letter sent to that address, labeled &quot;vacant&quot;. Instead I go pick up my mail (sent elsewhere) every six or weeks or so if I happen to be nearby.

<p><pre><code> &gt;Royal Mail chairman Keith Williams... said first-class stamps will have to rise “considerably” to pay for Royal Mail deliveries on Saturday. &gt;He said: “The cost to us is driven in part by [the fact that the] volume of letters has declined. You&#x27;re delivering the same number of letters over six days when you could be doing it over five. So that is forcing up stamp prices.” </code></pre> This is the same argument Royal Mail always trot out. It conveniently ignores the fact that, while it&#x27;s true that people are writing and sending less letters than they used to, the volume of other &#x27;stuff&#x27; being sent through the mail has gone up about eleventy billion percent in recent years, thanks to the amount of online shopping being done.<p>If Royal Mail can&#x27;t turn a profit in this kind of market, they shouldn&#x27;t be in business.

I’d quite happily go without a Saturday post delivery<p>Who knows why the UK Gov seem so keen on keeping it

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