Further reputational damage to the Royal Mail as it fails to deliver

A super copywriter was at work when that motto — associated with the US Postal Service — was dreamed up.

In fact, the American mail service doesn’t own the mission statement at all. 

It was written at least 2,500 years ago and the delivery heroes to whom it refers were the Persian postal couriers who reliably kept delivery services going throughout a lengthy war with Greece. 

The architects of a New York post office nicked it and engraved it on the wall of the building they had created, figuring, correctly, that the Persian copyright might be past its sell-by date and, as a consequence, being sued might not be a real and present danger.

Curious, the contrasting positions postal services hold in different national cultures. 

The US service, effectively set up by George Washington in 1792, has mostly held a place of pride and appreciation in American culture. 

In her recent book of essays about growing up poor in rural America, Bone of the Bone, Scribner 2024, Sarah Smarsh writes of her reverence for the United States Postal Services going right back to her teens.

“I was deeply aware of my family’s vulnerability working in remote fields, construction sites, and factories without adequate pay, health insurance, retirement funds, or sense of belonging to some official institution. 

“Postal work, while physical, difficult, and sometimes perilous, appear to come with all those basic benefits — plus I know most of my closest family members had suffered major work injuries toiling for industries that placed little value on their lives. 

“The Postal Service, though, seemed a protective force … when a college friend dropped other career pursuits and became a postwoman in Wichita, I felt somehow proud to know her and even a little pain of envy.”

Not a lot of that pride and reverence has ever prevailed in Ireland. 

The attitude is perhaps best summed up by a line I had to say as a toothless old postmistress in a Peacock Theatre review in the early seventies. 

I would bounce onto the stage and hand another performer an envelope, announcing, “Here is a letter for you from America. Which I read.”

It was one of those cracks that was assured of audience laughter 50 years ago and would leave an audience today mystified. 

The stereotype of the local post mistress spying on customers died somewhere along the line. 

Today, post mistresses and postmasters are bankers, parcel managers, retailers, and social servants. 

The great thing is under David McRedmond they are also part of an enterprise that is as modern as any — the vans that deliver the parcels are electric and the post offices themselves tend to be as physically improved as modern Garda stations, although neither profession might be pleased by the comparison.

Meanwhile, Britain’s Royal Mail has managed to destroy postmasters and postmistresses, not just in reputation terms but in some cases contributing to them taking their own lives. 

In order to protect the providers of a flawed software, management moved against their own people, right across Britain, accusing them of being crooked when their figures didn’t align with those generated by the computers.

It took nearly a decade, and boundless courage and self-belief on the part of some of those accused of wrongdoing, to force the system and the top management in that system to reveal the reality. 

In the last year, Royal Mail reputation-reversal has been uniquely complete, with local postal staff vindicated and the national top bods forced to resign.

You might think, looking at the Royal Mail, that, having caused itself such massive brand damage, it would concentrate on doing everything by the book from that point on. But no.

The latest news, emerging the day before Christmas Eve, is that deliverers say they were instructed by management to falsify records.

“Postal workers claimed they have been told to record some parcel deliveries as ‘inaccessible’ even if they never attempted to deliver the item,” Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported.

“That means customer operations managers would still receive their mid-year bonuses, understood to be based in part on hitting targets for the number of parcels that leave Royal Mail depots.”

The immediate outcome of this was some customers didn’t get their parcels in time for Christmas. 

Instead, notification came that the delivery service had tried and failed to get a response when they knocked on the door or buzzed the bell. 

This, despite, in many cases, the customer being at home at the time it was claimed that delivery had been attempted and more than willing to respond to a door knock or bell buzz.

This, in turn, meant that the bright red Royal Mail vans often returned to their depot carrying in excess of 30 packages each, which packages local managers had decided to describe as impossible to deliver because the recipient was ‘inaccessible’. 

If we want to go posh, we could describe this as a cultural or brand failure.

But let’s not talk culture or brand. 

Let’s just imagine you’re one of this bunch of managers and your potential bonus severely outweighs your cultural commitment or brand loyalty. 

A bird in the hand can be more tempting than commitment to a noble, if somewhat tainted brand. 

So you share with your peers your clever system. Or they share theirs with you. So far, so crooked.

But — as the previous Royal Mail scandal revealed — when management within that system buy into badness, they keep their mouths shut, not least because they have a vested interest in silent complicity. 

Same with the managers in this latest scandal, who might be a bit lower down but who could pretty much be relied on to keep their beaks buttoned in the interest of bonus-preservation.

What’s wrong with this picture, though? Right. The lower orders. 

Not to insult them, but the delivery guys in what might look like a conspiracy are shy on one crucial incentive. 

They have no vested interest. They don’t get rich through not doing their job. 

Even more irritating, they know that the middle managers to whom they report are being enriched by it.

Resentment and envy can be powerful stimuli for whistleblowing. As can a sense of forced disloyalty to an employer who hasn’t treated you badly.

“To do something like that, as it is dishonest — and the customer is expecting their parcel,” one deliverer told the Telegraph. 

“I don’t feel comfortable doing it. There is a culture of greed from the managers, and they just care about their bonuses.”

So the frontline guys blew the whistle and the British government minister in charge has asked the Royal Mail to investigate.

He has asked the entity accused to investigate itself. Barking.