I've seen a lot of moans about the Royal Mail 30p mail collection fee (which is per item BTW) and a similar number of posters thinking that the fee is fair given the time it takes posties and the fact free collection was a "limited [i.e. 2 year] promotion" so that sellers got used to it.
I expect that this fee will impact heavily on disabled private sellers who may be selling to supplement benefits, removal of winter fuel payment and income tax on pensions et al and can't get to a PO very easily or without help. I'm not disabled or retired and I'll happily walk miles every day, but there seems to be this assumption that if you don't wanna pay the fee then just visit the PO or a post box. For some of us it's not that easy.
I live in a village with no mains gas, no shops and a PO that visits the village hall once a week for 2 hours and sometimes less than that if the girl running it goes sick. The post box, which is a mini Victorian one on a pole, is the size of a postage stamp and could probably accommodate 2 large letter jiffy bags max. The nearest PO is 7 miles, the bus used to cost £5.10 one way but that's recently gone up to £5.95. So that's nearly £12 round trip and I don't use it enough to get a saver ticket (which doesn't save you much TBH). So much as I'd LIKE to visit the PO it's just not financially viable. And if someone buys something after 11am on a Monday when the PO packs up, it's a whole week until they come back again. So don't even have the option to save stuff up until they come back because I need to post within x number of days, depending on when the weekends fall. So I have no option but to pay the 30p. Over Christmas, when I seemed to sell a lot of things, I was sometimes booking collections for 5-10 items a day. £3 is a big outlay when you're mainly selling books and old clothes at a loss to buy coal. It would have been nice to have had some warning. I feel like private sellers are getting punched in the nuts again.
Yes, I could add 30p to the price of my items, but a problem with a lot of common books is that a lot of people have them for sale, so if you add 30p to the price and buyers have to pay a buyers premium because you're private - suddenly its cheaper for them to buy from a big chain business on eBay who buy their books in for pennies via these scanning apps, have agreements with courier companies that allow them to offer free postage and generally make decent profits even with being loads cheaper than me. I might as well not sell at all.
I don't object to the 30p charge per se, I just object to the fact that I don't have the same alternatives as people in more densely populated areas. I sometimes walk to St Andrews to save the bus fare, but it's not something you can do in the winter when it's dark and dangerous and it takes about 4 hours as it's rocky coastal terrain. I can't enable Evri because there isn't a drop off within 7-12 miles (the one 7 miles away only opens limited hours) so my postage prices are more expensive anyway and making the eBay buyers fee 30p less to offset this cost doesn't really benefit me as all that happens is the buyer gets their item 30p cheaper. I'm still having to pay the 30p at my end. If I charge the buyer with higher prices I just myself out of the market.
I also noticed that until recently you used to be able to drop RM at some Collect+ places but that seems to have stopped as well. Which is a shame because there is one close (8 miles away opposite direction to PO) where I visit the Doctor sometimes so that might have been an option.
Not really got any suggestions for improvement here except to say RM can go on all they want about larger digital post boxes with bigger slots and barcode readers but our village consists of listed buildings in a conservation area. Hence the quaint Victorian post box on a pole. So it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
I do think if you have a rural postcode RM ought to exempt you from the 30p charge. And eBay could give people with rural postcodes more time to post. That might be one option.
