Guilty as charged
Last week I made a reference to the Royal Mail which I've since realised was a little unfair. It was prompted by an article I read in The Week which was taken from a Daily Telegraph article. Unfortunately I can't link you to the article as neither The Week nor The Daily Telegraph are as helpful as The Guardian who as far as I can tell put all of their articles from the paper online.
Anyways, I digress. The article painted a rather bleak picture of The Royal Mail and the probabilities of your mail getting to its intended destination. The bbc.co.uk article I pointed you to in that post I made was rather damning as well. But if you look at the statistics on that very page you will see that:
It's interesting what a different spin can be put on things. Now I'm not saying it's acceptable that mail is stolen, or that 14.6 million items were lost, damaged or stolen. Obviously that number should go down, but I'm curious about those statistics. It makes a difference the way that it's reported. 14.6 million is a lot. Until you're told the context - 22 billion items delivered in total. Now. For all those that would point the finger, you run an infrastructure that is capable of delivering 22 billion items and see what percentage you get delivered. Given the nature of the human race, I'd say 99.9% isn't actually all too bad.
And of course, if it happens to you, you're going to get annoyed. But then that's always the way. I can't see that any company, big or small is going to operate a perfect service. Given the circumstances, 99.9% is good. Especially when you're talking about delivering 22 billion items. I know of smaller businesses that wouldn't be able to claim that rate of service.
Overandout.
Toby
Anyways, I digress. The article painted a rather bleak picture of The Royal Mail and the probabilities of your mail getting to its intended destination. The bbc.co.uk article I pointed you to in that post I made was rather damning as well. But if you look at the statistics on that very page you will see that:
- An estimated 99.9% of posted mail arrived safely
- 0.006% of posted mail was stolen
It's interesting what a different spin can be put on things. Now I'm not saying it's acceptable that mail is stolen, or that 14.6 million items were lost, damaged or stolen. Obviously that number should go down, but I'm curious about those statistics. It makes a difference the way that it's reported. 14.6 million is a lot. Until you're told the context - 22 billion items delivered in total. Now. For all those that would point the finger, you run an infrastructure that is capable of delivering 22 billion items and see what percentage you get delivered. Given the nature of the human race, I'd say 99.9% isn't actually all too bad.
And of course, if it happens to you, you're going to get annoyed. But then that's always the way. I can't see that any company, big or small is going to operate a perfect service. Given the circumstances, 99.9% is good. Especially when you're talking about delivering 22 billion items. I know of smaller businesses that wouldn't be able to claim that rate of service.
Overandout.
Toby
