Surely the problem here is not Royal Mail as a whole, but a failure on the part of local delivery offices? You are probably doing a spot on job Ady, as I'm sure many of your colleagues are. You do unfortunately get some bad eggs in every business, and it's those that people report back on. Same with any review site - people are far more likely to vent their anger, than go online and congratulate a person / business for providing good service.
As I said above, I get on great with my postie. I've had probably one crap postie the past 10 years, but all the others have been brilliant. They are great with the parents too, they appreciate that they are both disabled and are polite and professional when dealing with delays this might cause.
I've also had some excellent couriers. My local DPD chap was brilliant, knew him from business for a few years, then started using them for personal transactions. He once dropped a parcel off for me, after shift, in his own time, because he lived locally and a 'relief' driver pretended I wasn't in despite the fact I'm obsessive and was sat here on the PC looking out the window waiting for the van (while using the PC of course!). Turned out the relief driver didn't know the area and later said he couldn't find the address (which is easy to find).
Likewise I've had crap service from Royal Mail, and from couriers. My local RM for example, left a card on 23rd December, saying to collect the parcel on Christmas Eve. I roll up 5 minutes before the depot opened to be greeted with other people and a sign on the door saying 'open again 27th'. It was a last minute gift due to an Amazon Marketplace seller letting me down at the last minute.
Aside from things like this though, I generally don't fault RM - I just wish that they compete on price, if they did I would use them more. Unfortunately, as I said above, the cost of sending low value bulky parcels with them isn't competitive. Sending something like a 5KG PSU would cost me £14 2nd Class or £16 1st Class.
I'm talking about things like PSUs, which are only worth say £10 > £20 anyway. I can hardly say to a buyer 'yeah, I'll sell it for £20 but it'll cost you £15 in postage'. I'd also be stupid to eat the postage fees on that as I'd either make a loss, or get nothing for the PSU. So I use Collect+, print out the labels, pay online, take it to the BP down the road, and pay £6 instead of £16.
I can't fault Special Delivery, and use it to send items up to £1000 in value (adding extra insurance as required) and 1st Class is great for small packets, where they always arrive next day - but otherwise I don't use them.
Edited by Bencrest, 27 June 2014 - 10:10 PM.