Just a quick post as I have been asked on email a few times since yesterday whats happening with the postal strike and our orders. While the royal mail postal strike is ongoing we have a contingency in plan that should make sure most orders are still dispatched using city link parcels. We will be covering these extra costs and wont be asking you for any more for postage, it seems like the least we can do. We have been doing this since yesterday so I hope everyone who ordered coffee gets it in time to enjoy it over the weekend.
The only items that will be effect are international orders (including mainland Europe) under 2kg in weight and off shore inland post. There will also be a slight delay in dispatch of the twelve month orders which we will hold back until the end of next week or when the strike ends. We do ask for your patience during this industrial action but rest assured all is operating normally here.
Great communication Steve and a very generous gesture 🙂
Thanks for not leaving the coffee staling in the hands of the RM 🙂
I have been using Has Bean for a number of months, I have to say as online services go its probably the best i have encountered. I ordered some coffee on Thursday and the remembered the postal strike – aarrgghh ! To my surprise my coffee arrived today !! Thanks Steve again another reason why I always use Has Bean.
We do try our best to combat most situations…but although we are sympathetic to the postal service it is starting to wear a little thin. We will continue to send out everything out with City link for now and see how it goes.
Postal strike in the uk and train driver strike in germany … first makes my coffee not arrive last makes my sweetheart not arrive. Sometimes life’s just sad!
At least they won’t strike on the weekend so I can get to her soonish!
Best of luck guys! It’s massively frustrating, and I’m conscious of being another outsider wandering into a passionate and emotive debate about the livelihoods of folks who have a connection to our lives every day, so I caveat this comment with the apology of it being only opinion based on the news in the last few days.
But the postal industry is heading for a much deeper crisis than the issues on the table: email has slaughtered the amount of physical post we all send, direct mail marketing budgets are haemorrhaging (last month’s PWC audit of direct mail spend made depressing reading for any direct marketing agency), and most business communications have completed their switch to email and the web. Whatever your political stance, the economic reality is that ecommerce is the one rung holding up the revenues – and jobs – in the whole sector.
It’s the bitterest of ironies that the companies who use the Royal Mail to deliver their goods are almost single-handedly responsible for preventing the Royal Mail’s profitability from going into freefall. This month they’ve all been incentivised to look for alternatives, and once they switch suppliers there will be a downwards stepchange in the Royal Mail’s revenues.
I’m neither political, nor involved in the postal industry, so only just another observer, but I’ve been writing about the effects the digital networked society has on companies for more than a decade (http://meadows-klue.blogs.com), and it’s the classic businesses (rather than the digital natives like Amazon and Ebay) who hurt most under the pressure to adapt. There are no easy answers in all this, but if we’re to save rural post offices, preserve daily deliveries, maintain an equitable pricing structure that doesn’t penalise the isolated, have a nationwide efficient network, and save the jobs of the workforce, then some alternative models need to be figured out.
Let’s just hope – for everyone’s sake – that happens.