...
written by Mke P , 20 June 2008

This is the shiny surface of La Poste. The website with all the information, surprisingly simple and easy to navigate for a French website.

The dark underside unfortunately is the very high attrition rate. Articles 'lost' in international mail, packets arriving slit open and devoid of contents where these were of value, overcrowded and understaffed post offices, registered items lost.

I have never felt that La Poste was reliable, experiences in the last few months have convinced me that it is utterly unreliable.

Is there room for optimism? Maybe. A small packet, correctly stamped and addressed, posted in Munich on 28th. May, which we had given up for lost, arrived today, just over three weeks after posting.

Many other items though remain unaccounted for.

...
written by Mike Meade , 20 June 2008

Is France worse than elsewhere when it comes to postal service? In absolute terms it may be pretty dire but in relative terms it could be a differrent story. For example, in the UK where I am at the moment, 2500 Post Offices are slated for closure, including our local one. Postal service is variable at best and a friend and small businessman here reckons that up to 10% of his outgoing post never arrives. That seems an exaggeration to me but it must be said that he sells data-based CDs that look like what they are from the parcel so he just assumes that they are "nicked" by people (postal workers?) expecting to steal music.

From a user-friendly point of view, the tariffs for parcel post in the UK are incomprehensible even to postal employees. Unlike in France, you can't just weigh a small parcel and know how much postage to put on. You have to apply a complex equation having to do with weight, width, thickness etc. Result: customer inconvenience and very long queues at post offices because people can't tally the rates at home. That's hard on people with mobility problems, especially the elderly.

The Riviera Reporter is a regular client of La Poste and we are impressed by the improvements over the years. To put it simply, we are now treated like "clients" rather than "users". We have an allocated representative at their call centre in Marseille and she know our needs and habits which are all kept on their computer system the way some airlines keep your habitual seat preference. The contract system for sending out bulk mailings is now extremely efficient for businesses. We can set up a bulk mailing agreement on the internet in minutes and know exactly how much it will cost us.

But for non-priority post especially, delivery times can vary enormously. Sometimes people get their subscription copy within a couple of days while at other times it can take 2 weeks at the cheapest rate. If the Reporter was a paid newsstand magazine we could get guaranteed 2-day delivery to subscribers at even cheaper rates because we would qualify for the special service granted to newsstand press. This is a vestige of the old "paid press as public service" days. There's progress to be made there.

It's with mail to the UK that we have many problems. Here's an example of how stupid Royal Mail can be. We send 400 copies of the Reporter to UK subscribers every issue. When an addressee moves without leaving a forwarding address of course their copy is returned to us. What does Royal Mail do every time? They put their "No longer at this address" sticker right over the mailing address, completely concealing it. So how are we to know which of the 400 subscribers has not been delivered his copy? Someone isn't thinking.

Another problem is that Royal Mail never gets the receiver to sign for recorded delivery post from Europe. The letter just gets shoved through the letter box even though the European Postal Union says it should be signed for if the sender has paid for this service.

The recorded delivery tracking within France is superb. I recently tracked a recommended letter to Mouans Sartoux and was able to follow directly on the internet each time (twice) it was presented to the addressee, that he refused it each time, how long it waited at the local post office before he decided it was wise to go by and pick it up. As good as UPS or DHL when it comes to tracking. Parcels I order from hobby suppliers by Chronopost are traceable in real time on my suppliers web site with direct links to Chronopost. Excellent, but I presume that this is also the case in other countries these days. And strictly speaking Chronoposte isn't La Poste.

Postwatch estimates almost 15 million letters and parcels are "lost" by Royal Mail every year while 322 million are "undeliverable" and are supposedly returned to sender. In France the Que Choisir consumer association estimates that the French post office loses 1.5 million (sometimes due to theft by postal staff), a figure that's contested by La Poste but it's still 10 times lower than the Postwatch figure for Britain. Like all statistics, these are to be treated with caution.

As for your packet from Germany, was it in one of the "official" boxes or envelopes Deutsche Post insists upon? The Germans do not treat non-standard parcels the way other countries do and anything that isn't a normalised size takes forever to arrive or is simply not accepted.

Apart from some theft, the biggest problem with La Poste is local treatment of delivery, often by replacement staff filling in for a regular postman off on RTT or holiday. Another problem is the hold the unions, notably CGT, have on the bigger sorting offices. La Poste is one of hard-line unions' last bastions but perhaps Sarko will sort that out in time. It certainly needs some sorting (bad pun).

Sometimes we get surprises. We once were delivered a letter addressed to "Riviera Reporter, South of France" - nothing else, not even 06. How it got to us we'll never know but someone at La Poste pulled out the stops and made a special effort.

La Poste is a long way from perfect (theft is a major issue) and there certainly is a lot to criticise about them (their press relations are appalling) but on comparison it doesn't seem worse than others in comparably sized countries.

...
written by Kees van Reeuwijk , 03 July 2008

Well when compare to others (even Nederlands) I find La poste really great. The English (and Spainish) web site at laposte.com is so complete and easy. Everything to know is there. I see no other country as good a postal site. And in a foreign language, not French. Just look.