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Why is La Poste so unreliable?


NormanH
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I have posted several times before about the dreadful unreliability of La Poste at least in my area, and the deplorable service offered to customers in the bureaux.

I wonder if these news items which show a service highly under the control of the CGT offer  a glimmer of insight into the causes?

http://www.midilibre.fr/2012/12/18/poste-les-syndicats-denoncent-des-harcelements-moraux,614047.php

http://www.midilibre.fr/2012/10/31/un-facteur-mis-dehors-pour-insubordinations,586827.php

http://www.midilibre.fr/2011/04/26/une-greve-au-centre-de-tri-pour-denoncer-la-penibilite,309959.php

This reveals a different world to the friendly postie who will take your letters for you and go out of the way to see that your letters are delivered...

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Funny enough Mrs Q and myself were talking about this yesterday. Our postman retired two years ago. Initially we went through about four or five postmen and women before we got the one we have now. It seemed to us that different people tried the round and many didn't like it. The one we have now seems to deliver spasmodically even though we know things are on route to us. It's almost like he delivers to the village when he has enough mail to warrant going out of his way to come here. We just have the feeling that something is not quite right but can't quite put our finger on it if you know what I mean.

Our local post office is OK, the people are polite and you get to know the days people collect their social money, pensions etc. If you don't go on those days you have only a few minutes wait to get served. The thing is you don't want to complain else you might not get any mail at all.

The other funny thing is the current postman has had two Christmases delivering and has not tried to sell us a calendar. The old postman visited every year without fail.

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We were offered (and bought) La Poste calendars this year for the first time in 14 years in France, although the house we moved into in March is in the same area as the previous house, and a previous factrice lived in the same village.

My wife was surprised, as she didn't know they still existed; we have bought old ones from their years of birth as presents for family and friends.

The person who brought them round was not our usual postman, though, and he was surprised to learn they had not been offered at our previous address.

Edit: Getting off topic, I intended to suggest that perhaps the regular postmen don't want the extra work. If they actually offered the calendars we'd certainly give them a Christmas pourboire, but this may not be a french custom. Our postbox is outside the house, so we rarely see them normally.

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[quote user="woolybanana"]

In fact, the posties buy the calendars and then resell them to make an extra few festive bob.

 

[/quote]

That's fair enough. Maybe our previous village was too poverty-stricken for the postman/lady to bother trying to sell them[:)]

No complaints about the service either here nor there, though. They still deliver the odd Christmas card with our old address to the new house, even though our paid-for forwarding service has now expired.

When we first moved in the postman knocked on the door, said he noticed we'd moved, and suggested we put our name on the box so any different postmen would know.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

On 11/12/12, three items were posted in Devon, at the same office, to me. Two, a card and a "small packet" arrived within a week. The third,a small parcel, originally a whisky-bottle box, got caught in the French need to slap a bar-coded label on parcels, and arrived on the 28th. As it contained trivial items intended to be a Xmas stocking, this was a pity.

Never mind - it provides work for a French person. That's much more important than delivering mail on time, after all.

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