Just to show how stupid a government can be.........

[KvHagedorn]

You're a proud member of the third world now, Lawrence.. and the naive liberal European crybabies who are the only people with a public mouth think all is well with the world because of it.

[LvR]

Too true.

It would have not been so bad if the courier companies did not come into being and prospered as a result of exactly the screw-ups and inadequacies of the original government controlled postal service..........

May the fleas of two thousand camels infest their festering armpits.

[Novdid]

Brian, you know very much about post service in general. May I ask how you learned all this. I work from time to time carrying letters to make some extra money, and every thing you say is correct.

[Technoid]

Originally posted by Brian Ellis
KvH

Yes, but they may envisage making it more efficient by monopolising the market and economy of scale. At least, that is how I read it. I think that in all countries that have a denationalised and liberal postal service, the aim for profit has made the service less efficient, even though they still carry the bulk of mail.

The thing that amazes me is that so few countries have an efficient giro system run by the Post Office. This is extraordinarily profitable (much more so than carrying letters) and works a treat. It's like an efficient cost-free banking system specialising in rapid money transfers, even of tiny sums. See https://www.postfinance.ch/FinancePo...ory=payingpriv

In sweden we used to have that, untill the Royal swedish mail, became a "free enterprice" and plowed itself down into the ground and sold of the giro division to a bank wich turned into a "make money above all" institution

So now it still exists on paper, but not in reality, and definitly not in a usuable way

[Brian Ellis]

Originally posted by Novdid
May I ask how you learned all this.

The glib answer is that, when I was a student, I worked as a Christmas extra for the Royal Mail.

However, that was in the 1940s

As a Swiss entrepreneur and a relative important user of postal services, I observed what was happening. Since the P part of PTT became Swisspost and the TT part became Swisscom, the god of profit became primordial to worship. Costs went up, services came down, exactly parallel of Technoid's description of Sweden.