Royal Mail Post Offices

The United States Post Offices are owned and run by the United States Postal Service. We Americans are all familiar with them and somewhat familiar with all the services you can get at a U.S. Post Office. When I came over here to England, I figured the post offices here would be similar.

Wrong!

While the Royal Mail owns the post offices here, they are run as franchises. And because of this difference, they are run as a business by the people who have the franchise for any particular post office. This doesn't mean that they get to set the rates of postal services, but that they also offer other services and/or products beyond what we would expect to find in a post office.

The first time I came to England to meet and visit with Rebecca (before we married, obviously), I had U.S. money that I wanted to get changed into British currency. Instead of going to a bank as I expected us to do, she took me to the local post office just up at the top of the hill in our neighborhood. They didn't have enough cash on hand to make the exchange, so they sent us to another post office that handles larger cash reserves. I've come to learn that this is the common place to make currency exchanges, especially now that the Euro is the defacto currency of most of the European Union.

At our post office, the Lobley Hill Post Office, a person can go in and pay many of their bills, do some limited banking chores, buy insurance of most kinds, buy candy and/or a drink, buy greeting cards, ship parcels, pay car tax (theirs is a little paper disk displayed in the lower left-hand side of the front windshield). Some others offer a large selection of newspapers and magazines instead. And the largest ones are much like a drug store, just without the pharmacy part.

Not only that, but the British Post Offices also allow a person to take care of a lot of their government business there too. They'll have forms there for what most people would need to interact with the Royal Government. Council government forms and such are an entirely different matter; you have to go down to the Civic Center (their word for our Court House) and enter into a maze of confusing offices that make most of us feel like we're back home trying to find our way around a hospital. But that's an entirely different story and will be told another time.

Our post office, the Lobley Hill Post Office is run by a lovely Indian couple (Christians no less) who deal with all the myriad duties with such aplomb that it amazes me. It doesn't seem to faze either of them to switch from making a deposit for someone into their banking account, regardless of the bank, to figuring up shipping charges for a pile of packages and letters to selling insurance. We usually pop in to make a cash withdrawal from our bank account there because there is no charge . . . and we get a chance to visit with the couple who run the post office, if they're not too busy.

The things that you will find missing from Royal Mail Post Offices are post office boxes! Nor do they sort mail for delivery. That is handled by a different branch of the Royal Mail. Speaking of mail delivery, the mail here is not delivered to a mail box out by the street or hanging on the wall near the front door. The Post Man walks around to each house and slides the mail through a mail slot in the front door. If there is a package too big to go through the slot, the Postman will try to deliver to you by hand if you are at home. Otherwise, he/she will leave a post card with details of how you can get your package, either by going down to a central warehouse where service is somewhat spotty and only before lunch, or by making arrangements to have it delivered to the local post office for the charge of 50 pence. We usually find it much easier, if a package number is given on the card, to arrange online to have it delivered to the Lobley Hill Post Office.

I've also learned that there are certain days that one should avoid going to the post office if one is in a hurry. That's when all the pensioners come in to pay their bills just after they get their pension checks. I just have trouble remembering when those days are. LOL But then I wind up either meeting up with someone from my church or meeting someone new. As you might guess, they all love to hear me talk; my accent is so rich to them. So, all in all, it works out to the good no matter what. And no matter how long the line or how busy they've been all day, the couple who runs our post office always make you feel like you're their best customer.

There has been a lot of worry lately because the Labour Government has been talking about closing down a fair percentage of post offices across the land because of rising expenses. I don't know why they don't just go up on their postal rates like our Postal Service does every so often. not only that, but the local post offices here are the focal points of the various neighborhoods! I think this is something that we Americans might not appreciate as much nowadays. Now me, I'm the new kid in the neighborhood. But most of these people have lived here all their lives; some for more than a few generations. The three places where everyone congregates in these neighborhoods are at the church (sadly, this is not like it used to be), the corner shop and the post office. Everyone knows everyone else by constantly running into each other at these places. Since the local church is not the center of the neighborhood like it used to be - I heard two years ago that only 14% of the population here in England are Christians and attend church - that leaves the corner market and the post office as the two remaining focal points of the neighborhood. By closing down a lot of post offices, the national government will be taking out a big chunk of the heart of a lot of neighborhoods, leading to further decay of neighborhood unity. And when I say neighborhood, you can also read that as village, because in bigger cities, that's what local neighborhoods are, just villages that have been overtaken and absorbed into a larger city. For villages out in the countryside, it would gut them completely!