How to stop Post Office queues

Thursday, October 02, 2008

According to news yesterday, Post Office queues in London are up to half an hour long.

No great surprise to anyone who has stood in one, as I have. Stood, and seethed and raged and thought how much quicker it could be. (I suspect the Post Office don't want to reduce queues - they try to flog stuff to those in the queue after all.)

Two easy ways to shorten these queues are:

  • Introduce two queues - one for those who just want a stamp, or just want their parcel weighed and posted. And one for those who have 40 minute long queries about their passports, their ATM bank cards, their giros, their whatever-the-hell-is-taking-so-long.
  • Introduce self-service. Londoners are busy, busy people. Tesco, Boots, Sainsburys all recognise this and now let us do your thing ourselves. One post office could have 3 self service weight / postage machines.
Easy, really, isn't it?

2 comments:

Boz said...

Post Offices drive me insane. They are seemingly staffed by residents of Royston Vasey, undertaking some Kafka-esque plot to make the world see red by closing all bar one serving hatch when the queue gets really big.

But I recently discovered you can create and print postage off online - which is a bit of a genius idea. All you need know is how big and heavy your parcel / letter is, and have access to a printer.

Raquelita said...

Here in Germany there are ATM style machines where you can buy your stamps yourself,next to post boxes for both letters and parcels.And guess what?It's a system that works!