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The electrical goods retailer Currys has revealed it has dropped Royal Mail from doing its deliveries “for now” because of the strike action.
Currys’ chief executive, Alex Baldock, said its first responsibility was to the “UK households who want to get hold of their technology, particularly at this time of year”.
Royal Mail is facing six days of strikes this month, including Christmas Eve. On Friday, it told the public to send their cards and presents even earlier than usual if they wanted them to arrive on time.
Baldock said of the decision to stop using Royal Mail as a delivery provider for the time being: “There is no great drama operationally for us. We plan for this sort of thing all the time. There are relatively few smaller parcels that we distribute through Royal Mail [and] they are easily switchable to another provider.”
He told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: “The bigger point here is that clearly on the one hand we see with our own colleagues and our own customers up close, the impact of the cost of living crisis that is obviously at the root of these strikes.
“On the other hand, it doesn’t help when our colleagues can’t get to work. It doesn’t help when we can’t get stuff delivered to customers, and of course a wage-price inflationary spiral is simply going to make things worse for everybody for longer.”
Members of the Communication Workers Union, which represents more than 115,000 postal workers, have already held 12 days of strike action in an increasingly bitter and protracted dispute with management over pay and conditions, with further stoppages planned on 9, 11, 14, 15, 23 and 24 December.
Royal Mail has said that the final date for second-class deliveries is 12 December, while for first class it is 16 December. Meanwhile, delivery deadlines to international destinations have been brought forward.
Currys is one of several major retailers that have been forced to increase wages repeatedly in response to chronic staff shortages and soaring inflation.
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Baldock told the BBC programme his staff had been given a 16% pay rise over the past year, above the rate of inflation, because “we need to retain and motivate a workforce”, and that is “the price we are paying for the right talent”.
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