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Here’s a useful tip. Go to the Royal Mail websiteand you can ask your postman to collect letters or parcels from your home at acost of 60p per item. You pay for postage online, print a label and book acollection for the following day. Granted, it’s an extravagant way to merelyavoid a walk to the postbox, but for special delivery items or parcels it’s agodsend. If you don’t have a printer at home, you can even get your postie tobring a label.
Given that Royal Mail was founded in 1516, I’mnot quite sure why it took 500 years to come up with this particular wheeze,but better late than never. In the US, where they have mailboxes rather thanslots in the door, postmen have always collected mail. That’s why many Americanmailboxes have a little flag on them – you raise it to signal when you havepost to be collected.
So there’s nothing new about this idea. But itis really useful. Why is no one writing about it? Do simple, useful ideasreceive too little attention? In the same way, why is everyone talking aboutthe metaverse when video-conferencing – an established technology – is surelymuch more economically significant? Frankly I’m not entirely convincedconversations with my colleagues will be much improved by my appearing as aweird 3D avatar with strangely unconvincing facial movements.
Do we overvalue novelty? Particularly whenexperience teaches that most network or ‘platform’ technologies tend to bequite old before they really become useful. This comes down to mathematics. Aproperty of many network businesses is that they can only work once they reacha certain scale. This was true of the universal postal rate introduced by SirRowland Hill in 1840, which lost money for many years before attracting enoughvolume of mail to make it pay. It took a mathematician – the great CharlesBabbage, no less – to show how, with enough letters consolidated on trunkroutes, distance adds very little to the cost per letter.
Such network businesses are often described as‘natural monopolies’. That’s debatable. But are there ideas which in theirearly years are ‘necessary monopolies’? Had we not awarded Royal Mail aninitial monopoly for the penny post, competition between postal services mighthave meant none became big enough to work.
What other valuable businesses could becreated if government returned to doing what it did for hundreds of years:licensing a monopoly to a single provider for an initial period? This was howalmost all utilities started, after all. The National Lottery is a more recentexample.
I could suggest three off the bat:
1) A nationwide network of open-access parcellockers for ecommerce. It is simply unsustainable – and creates too muchtraffic – for online purchases to be delivered to 22 million homes, whenperhaps 15,000 locker locations could serve the population perfectly well. It’sabsurd that ordering five things requires five vans to call at your house.
2) A central system for paying for onlinecontent by making small one-off payments for single articles or films – tobreak the current daft dichotomy where you can either subscribe to, say, the FTfor £35 a month or not read it at all.
3) A nationwide platform for short jobs, asWingham Rowan has long proposed, acting as a clearing house for people’s sparetime. A place where both businesses and members of the public could hire peoplefor just a few hours at a stretch.
Such ideas could be hugely valuable forconsumers and businesses, but only if a temporary monopoly is allowed the timeto scale them in the first place. Competition is a fine thing. But not when itprevents a category from existing at all.
