There are currently Royal Mail free collections on offer for Royal Mail Tracked 24 and Tracked 48 products. If you go to book a delivery, you’ll find it nigh on impossible to buy these services without having a free collection booked in.
This is an amazing service if you only have a few parcels to send – normally Royal Mail Collect costs 60p per item. Book the service and you can opt for a collection any time up to seven days in advance for free. If you are booking on your mobile and don’t have a printer don’t worry – Royal Mail will even turn up at your door with a label ready to slap onto your parcel.
There is only a couple of downsides with Royal Mail free collections and that’s that you can only book the service for a collection from the next day onwards – if you’re reading this today it’s already too late to have a pick up today, but you can have one tomorrow for free.
The other downside is that if you have more than five items to send, you’ll have exceeded the maximum number of collections allowed on any one day. It would be rude of me to suggest that some people might simply have five parcels collected from their address and have any overflow collected from obliging neighbours and we’re pretty sure Royal Mail don’t want you to emulate this behaviour as it must be costing them a fortune.
Royal Mail free collections mean that they have no revenue to cover collection costs and even if you choose another service and pay 60p for a collection it’s hard to see how they make any money on the service.
The label isn’t costing any more than if you drop it off at a Delivery Office or Parcel Post Box (or a Post Office for any service other than Tracked), so they’ve basically got 60p (or 0p for tracked) to print a label and send a Postie out in a van to collect the item. If it’s a larger item (and the tracked services cover boxes up to 61x46x46cm with a weight up to 20kg), they won’t even be able to collect when they deliver your letters… they’re going to need to send a van down your road just to collect one parcel!
However, it’s not your problem to worry whether Royal Mail are making any money – Royal Mail free collections are on offer so we’re recommending you take full advantage and sit in the sun and let your local Postie collect rather than schlepping down the road to drop parcels off yourself.
We don’t know how long this offer for a free collection will last – it may well be an incentive to get you buying a parcel service which you can’t purchase (or drop off) at the Post Office. But Summer is coming and the weather is lovely (some of the time) so, if you have the odd parcel here and there to send, get a free collection!
If you do need to drop your parcel off today and save a day in transit, buy the service and simply delete the free collection in checkout and then you can drop off as normal.
One Response
They’re not sending a ‘Postie’ out in a van to collect. The parcels are being collected at the same time as deliveries. No extra costs then. It’s the same service that USPS and other mail providers have been offering for many years.