Potential Price Increase?

As an employee of Royal Mail, I feel it is my duty to inform you all that a price rise may be fairly imminent.

In order to remain competitive, Royal Mail is proposing quite a significant price rise. Ofcom has given the green light for second class stamps to rise from 36p to possibly 55p. That is a rise of 53%! Not the usual annual 2p rise

Although they have imposed a cap on second class, they have not done so on first class. So I'm sure the price increase will be 50% too, at least.

Please bear this in mind, as it may be out of Paul's hands when the prices change to increase the costs of turns quite a bit.

Unless of course Paul can sweet talk the pretty lady in the Post Office.....

Might be the cue for further investigation into the possibility of emailed turns to and from?

I'll pay more for my stamps when they can deliver my post before 2pm, tis a joke round here!

paul, its time to sweet talk (or bend over) the pretty lady behind the counter hehe

in all seriousness though, there's not much we can do about this sort of thing.

best thing to do fellas is buy 20 packs of stamps in advance before the price rises. including you paul

Most turns currently cost £1.09p so a 50% rise would be 55p a turn quite alot really.

Trouble with the royal mail is they have no competition, if there was I'd use em for sure...competitive my you know what.

Okay I will seriously look at doing email turns, its not too difficult but the big drawback is printing it all your end, as the reports are fairly complex to printout and all use the hewlett packard printing language.

So what printers do you all use ?

and maybe I can sort something out.

What I will start to do is to deconstruct the various reports into their non-formatted versions and see if I can get them to print out on any printer, may mean having to print more pages your end, but if it saves you the postage and having to wait for your turn then I'm willing to try it.

personally i dont use my own printer, i use the mothers. so i wouldnt mind just buying a cheap HP printer lol

I'm with Phil, happy to buy a cheap HP printer, although I presume Paul you mean we will need a PCL printer?

What kind of format would they potentially be sent in Paul - something like PDF/Word or would we need a special programme to open the turns?

HP officejet here. No problems with printing out pages

how much does ink cost for a normal printer these days? if im getting thru three ink cartidges a year then what is more expensive, 24 x £1.55 or 3 ink cartridges?

I would only be interested in printing out the turn sheet anyway so wouldnt use much more ink than i already do, and would only print the turn sheet out if we still had to post it back.

If we could come up with email turns and email submission sheets then job done all round, wouldnt need to print anytihng off.

Thus saving paper and making my wife happy that i dont have those stupid football sheets laying round the house all the time (her word not mine!).

Im all for this, as in terms of time im struggling to post my turn out on time, fridays tend to be my quiet day and its already too late to post by then so emailing turns would be huge for me.

Be interesting to see what you can sort Paul.

Ross@Blackpool wrote:

Thus saving paper and making my wife happy that i dont have those stupid football sheets laying round the house all the time (her word not mine!).

You're not the only one Ross, my girlfriend is exactly the same lol!

same as tom, hp officejet thingy so not a problem

as long as i can print the turn sheet out then i'm happy to hopefully just sit on my laptop and read it form the screen if thats doable

The price increase is actually because of the increased competition in the postal market place.

Thanks to our marvelous government they decided to open up the postal market to anyone that wants a piece.

so now u have every company from city link to datapost and from TNT to Dave couriers that are all only interested in cherry picking the lucrative contracts and cities/areas where you have high volume in a small area.

This leaves Royal mail to pick up the pieces and have to transport a 36p or 46p envelope to Aberdeen or in our cases, our turns to cornwall.

hardly a money spinner is it.

bearing in mind i live about a 5 minute drive to nottingham city centre and if i was to try and get a bus it would set me back a coupe of quid,

then in comparison the current prices royal mail charge are ludicrously cheap.

im not saying for one second the serivce is partiurly good and certainly not faultless, we get to see first hand some of the chimps that deliver people mail but what can they do?

speech over lol

First class stamps will increase from 46p to 60p and second class from 36p to 50p from 30 April, Royal Mail says http://t.co/GBJMLxPB

Not that bad really.