Royal Mail Rubber Band | Hacker News Reader

Royal Mail Rubber Band

en.wikipedia.org

87 pointsykat757 comments

my uncle was a postman, when I young he used to give me as many rubber bands as I needed, from memory they were brown

I made a daisy chain of rubber bands that - when stetched, was about 400meters long (to the end of our street). When i let it go, I thought something crazy would happen (i was about 6-7)but in reality nothing really happened it just shrank fast

I was extremely disapointed, it look many days to do this, I learnt at an early age about imagination vs reality

I was expecting the same, even though I’m 38! On the upside, you dodged what could have been a horrible accident: Ropes snap and take away limbs, tug-o-war accidents are horrible and at scale - https://priceonomics.com/a-history-of-tug-of-war-fatalities/

He wouldn't have been able to stretch it in the first place to dangerous levels of potential energy.

I think they mean if something actually had happened (Which would have been impossible) it would have been a very bad!

If I'm going to lose an eye or a limb, I want it to because I got sliced by a 7 year old's 400m rubber band death whip.

>give me as many rubber bands as I needed

in USSR pretty much everything was in shortage, including rubber bands, and when you got your hands on it, you'd do something like "rubber band motor" plane or boat like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5injNIPjiZc

The volume of rubber bands used is equivalent to 1500 Escobars, another prolific rubber band user. Strangely Pablo did not get as much criticism and complaints about his excessive usage.

If the odd rubber band is the price I have to pay for nice, friendly men (and they are almost all men, for some reason) turning up at my door, and perhaps helping me if some disaster has befallen me, then it's a price I'm willing to pay.

Now, back to watching England getting slaughtered by Italy... oh, wait!

> perhaps helping me if some disaster has befallen me

What service are you referring to?

The ones where they look through your window and seen you have fallen and cannot get up.

I don't think that's really their job and I wouldn't depend on it!

It's not their job, but in my experience they are pretty dependable, one way or another.

I was depending on England's defeat and planned to sing "Just one Cornetto" from the back door at final whistle, but it looks like I might be disappointed.

I wouldn't bet, myself. England's horrid habit of passing backward, which I have seen for over 50 years, may still sink them. As my late Dad used to say, you want to play your game in the opponent's half.

Oh god. I think what Italy are doing illustrates what I mean.

2005 was peak mail. More letters than ever were delivered then and only in one delivery as they had got rid of the second delivery by then, with post arriving whenever rather than before breakfast. Things started to fall off a cliff in the years after that with businesses and government moving online. However, during this period, with more letters per address delivered at a time, there must have been unprecedented demand for the rubber bands.

The Royal Mail also encouraged bulk mail during that time doing final mile for companies that were competition and specialising in junk mail.

Luckily those days are over and most non elderly people in the UK can expect zero letters on most days.

We still receive junk mail with the postal deliveries a couple of times a month. Brown rubber bands too.

At my first tech job there was a guy who had a ball made from the rubber bans the postie would leave every day. He had been doing it for 2-3 years before I joined. It was twice the size of a baseball.

I remember collecting rubber bands from the postie as a child to make a rubber band ball. I remember most of them being brown. Sometimes our post comes bundled with a rubber band now. I don't think I've ever seen a red one.

I had 3 small packages arrive this Friday, left on my door and tied together in a brown rubber band. Like you, I have never seen a red one either, blue one's yes, though rare.

At my high school in the US back in the 70’s (yikes), all the rage was to have your school books bound and carried using a US Postal Service adjustable leather tie-out strap.

Our posties are always littering the streets and even my driveway with regular brown rubber bands!

Not so common these days and for me personally a shame as was always a good source of freebies in that respect, I had to buy some a while back and ironically the quality of bands the post office use are pretty darn good compared to the ones I purchased (which all turned to crud after a few years and kinda dried out for want of a better way of explaining how they went).

The kids clear them up here. In my case I spent several years carrying a scooter with about 3kg of the things on the main pole back from school every day.

> that contemporary red rubber bands are designed to be more biodegradable than previously used brown bands, so as to lessen the environmental impact

Doesn't this mean less reusable?

Not necessarily -- at least, not unless you count people reusing discarded rubber bands. Typically the strategy used in cases like this is to make the material break down faster in the presence of water; assuming postal workers aren't trying to get the mail wet, the rubber bands should also stay dry enough to be reusable.

I have plastic compost bags which stay intact for months in the cupboard but fall apart in 2 days when filled with wet food waste.

My dad was a postman. He always used to bring home big bundles of these and I’d make rubber band balls out of them. Good times. =)

It seems they no longer use them. I remember having to pick them up quite regularly so it’s no wonder they consumed so many.

I live in York, England.

They bloody well do still use them; I find them on my doorstep regularly!

I've got on hanging around the fire smash glass activation thingie outside my door, and another around a handle on my chest of drawers (can't remember why!).

As far as I can tell they've just give back to using brown ones, which makes them a little less obviously related to the Royal Mail when you see them on the ground.

Having noticed the increasing proliferation of super-thin easily-breakable rubbish rubber bands, I for one would welcome availability of high quality ones.

I'd once seen a show about a murderer in the UK that was caught partially due to his use of yellow cable ties that were exclusive to the Royal Mail.

A bit of Googling shows it came from the murder of Leanne Tiernan. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2116617.stm

I'm not from the UK obviously because, one look at the picture and my reaction was darn, those things look handy.

The ubiquitous leftover rubber band hereabouts comes from bundles of broccoli but that's a less convenient form factor.

Has anyone noticed that in the UK, posties work for the Royal Mail, whereas in the US, mail carriers work for the US Postal Service. It's a curious inversion

In the UK, you get the bill and you pay with a cheque. In the US you get the check and you pay with a bill.

I don't think I've seen a cheque used in decades now. Are they even still accepted in shops?

There had been plans to phase out the cheque in 2018, however the portion of the population that still uses cheque wield popular sympathy, so the plan was abandoned.

Now the official line is that cheque's will continue as long as people use them, but substantial investment will be made in making digital transfers the default. This has meant replacing the slow BACS and expensive CHAPS with Faster Payments, and cash with contactless.

So cheque is accepted almost nowhere, almost dead, but is being strung along until the boomers are gone. It would be fine if it wasn't such a PIA to handle.

Checks have the advantage that they teach everyone patience - whenever someone at the supermarket checkout is taking a solid 5 minutes writing a check for $13.92, and then the cashier takes another 5 minutes going through some complicated ritual accepting the check as payment.

They haven't been accepted in shops for over 10 years now. Cheques still see some use elsewhere, but are slowly being replaced by cash, cards and bank transfers depending on the use case. The Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheque#United_Kingdom) sums it up pretty well.

Our post is still delivered in rubber bands, but they're no longer red.

If you happen to have a relevant source for this information the Wikipedia entry could use a citation for that statement in the introductory paragraph. Unfortunately personal experience and observation is not sufficient.

Never change, HN.

Could you explain? I'm not sure where I went wrong.

I think this is probably down to unfortunate phrasing - at first blush it looked like you're doing the [citation needed] thing on someone who was just adding an interesting anecdote to the brown/red band situation. However I assume you just wanted to say that this info would be an interesting addition to that page, and if OP had any idea whether there was any more official info on this that would be cool, since the anecdote alone likely won't satisfy wikipedia editors.

Observing non-red rubber bands doesn't make a person more likely to have a link to a Wikipedia-accepted source article about it, right? So the person suggesting a Wikipedia edit may just as well Google it themselves.

Yes, you are right I did not try to search for it myself before writing the comment. However I did just try and it is harder than you might think to search for something like this. I suspect if I had a better understanding of British English I might more readily stumble onto an appropriate phrasing that turns up a source.

Thanks.

Yes, at the time I wrote the original comment, in the Wikipedia page linked there was a comment in the lead section of the article: "The Royal Mail no longer uses red rubber bands.{{Citation needed|date=June 2020}}". And given that the comment I was replying to seemed to be from someone local I thought they might be in a position to have or find a reference and update the Wikipedia article with that, since other comments here seemed to agree that the rubber bands are not currently red.

However that sentence has just been removed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Royal_Mail_rubber...

You didn't go wrong, not at all.

Quebec, Canada, blue bands here...

Ours seem to be the conventional beige too. Maybe custom rubber bands were costing too much.

Judging by my driveway, they seem to be white at the moment!

I think our mail systems are probably some of the most wasteful aspects of our society. At this point, I really can’t imagine the need for actual mail to come to my house. Fully 95% of the mail I get is adverts, 4.999% are bills (that could be digital), and .001% is genuine letters from another person.

All that paper, fuel and wasted human effort to make sure I get something I throw away in the recycle bin immediately after I get it. It should honestly be a crime and I don’t know how it isn’t.

The government figured out the ad-sponsored business model well before Facebook and Twitter. I only receive junk mail, but I guess it subsidizes package delivery that I actually want.

FWIW If you’re in the UK you can opt out of non addressed mail (https://personal.help.royalmail.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/...) delivered via RM

In 2005 the Royal Mail was fully privatised. Since then I personally feel the amount of unaddressed mail has increased. But that might be in my head

Whaaat? Very much disagree. I think you are forgetting packages. Where I live, the postal service delivers packages every day of the week. Sundays included. The mail is a critical service, done efficiently and with a smile. The world would end if people could not get their packages.

In most western countries the mail is the official way to reach you. Court, legal, tax, etc documents will all come via the national post. That’s a large part of why they’re protected, we don’t have a good mechanism to replace this. At the very least, gig-workers ain’t it.

(IANAL) I thought the court was required to serve more important papers (like warrants) via courier, in-person. But agreed that does lack scalability.

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