I live near a delivery office and the difference at the moment cmpared to how it is over summer is incredible. They have every van stuffed full, even the passenger seat area, I wonder how the driver can possibly find the mail for each street. No wonder they’re delivering up until 9pm and on Sundays, it probably takes them the extra time to keep rummaging. They’ve also got loads of hire vans with little printed pages in the windscreen saying ‘Temporary Royal Mail Delivery Van’ which must be for traffic wardens or something.
I still have delays, not as bad as December, but stuff takes days to get from the London mail centres to my delivery office then to me, whereas it used to be next day, with all the transfers happening overnight. A lot of items don’t get scanned at the delivery office so the tracking doesn’t say Out for Delivery like they normally would, first I know is when the postman buzzes my flat.
I wish they could operate a bit more like DPD and give estimated times and live tracking for tracked parcels but it’s obvious why they can’t - they have to deliver tens of millions of items every year. It’s interesting Royal Mail’s own Parcelforce service does have this though. Maybe one day.