Royal Mail owners agree to £5B takeover offer | Hacker News Reader

Royal Mail owners agree to £5B takeover offer

bbc.com

17 pointsluu21 comments

“But the company's performance in recent years has deteriorated, leading to heavy financial losses, with customers regularly not receiving letters, including important medical appointments and legal documents, on time.”

When does privatization not lead to this?

When the privatization happens only inside the head of a tory?

To be fair, people use these as a reason to privatize Canada Post.

So the same set of reasons is used to argue for the opposite outcome.

That’s called deliberately “running down” a service so it can be sold off on the cheap to your friends. Same thing happened with water and rail privatisation in the UK. When the railways were finally privatised there were several fatal train disasters that lead to the rail network being re-nationalised as Network Rail with the train “operators” now working under a franchise model. These usually make a huge loss that is then subsidised by the government. The franchises are sometimes owned by foreign governments and used as a way to subsidise foreign rail services. Sometimes the franchises are re-nationalised again, such as in the case of services on the East Coast Mainline, and then are suddenly profitable again under public ownership.

It all makes me wonder whether natural monopolies that provide essential public services can ever be run better by a profit making company with little to no democratic oversight.

Privatise the profits, socialise the losses.

It's the Tory way. Though one not opposed by nu-Labour when in power during the 2000's.

Saying the only reason why a public service is terrible is because it was “intentional” seems a massive stretch.

You’re ignoring poor management, bad processes, etc.

I wouldn't put it in the same way as the previous poster, but if your argument is "government can't run anything right! They always make a complete mess of things!", then you're not going to actually run these services all that well. You have a strong interest to NOT run these services well, because "see, told you I was right!"

I don't think there's some sort of intentional 4D chess plan going on, or corruption to make a profit, but certainly a lot of conflicted interests and bias to not make it work. That's one cause of "poor management, bad processes, etc."

I'm arguing that government services are susceptible to the same failings, and more, of non-governmental services.

So to argue that the only reason why they fail is a lack of funding is laughable.

Are you saying that Canada mail is being deliberately rundown?

If so, what is your evidence?

If not, why are you replying to this comment about it?

And is exactly what’s being done to the NHS now

Monopolies lead to this. The government should shift to other alternative delivery companies, nearly all of which are indeed better than Royal mail.

> nearly all of which are indeed better than Royal mail

Because none of them have the universal service obligation that the Royal Mail has.

Apples <-----> Oranges

Royal Mail has a special VAT exemption which is meant to compensate for this.

How many of your parcels were in fact delivered by Hermes and how manh hours per parcel did you spend on the phone with them?

> When does privatization not lead to this?

In a British context - BP, BT, and BA have all performed reasonably well. Financially self sufficient with industry average customer satisfaction.

British Steel is an odd one, in that its financial difficulties were more caused by global market conditions rather as much as any management issues. Not aware of how its customers feel.

Rolls Royce has excelled on all measures.

I find this surprising to read. My personal experience with Royal Mail is rock solid.

When the privatised entity has sufficient competition and operates in a competitive market. Mail, rail and water are good examples of privatised monopolies in the UK, and they've all gone bloody terribly.

This is so depressing. If it was publicly owned I’d love to see Royal Mail replicate Amazon Marketplace. The government could even legislate against first preference so Amazon cannot penalise sellers for offering goods for a lower price on alternative platforms. Reducing the 40-50% cut Amazon takes from each sale would go a way to reducing inflation and put money in the government coffers at the same time.

post-Communist real estate money is buying your mail, Brits

You thought you had it bad, you can look forward to some royal enshittification now!

PS: (pun intended)

There is a lot of profit to be made until there is no margin to grow by which time it will be renationalized after paying for private jets, fancy parties, Eton Tuition and vacation to Monaco for a few people.

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