Royal Mail To Flog Items Lost In The Post on eBay
ROYAL Mail’s dodgy reputation can come in handy sometimes. Birthday cards that you forget to send or cheques that you have yet to post can all be explained away by claiming that they’ve been “lost in the post”.
And now you can buy them back. The Royal Mail is auctioning off a huge number of items that really do go missing in transit.
The contents of an estimated 75,000 packages which failed to reach their destination are finding their way onto internet auction sites each year with even customers who have paid for the Royal Mails ‘secure’ postal services discovering that their goods are ending up on eBay.
One such customer, retired teacher John Beattie, discovered the issue after stumbling across a set of rare bagpipes on eBay, the exact same bagpipes he had posted a few months previously.
The 55-year-old Beattie received £500 in compensation, the maximum on offer, but has still been left £1,000 out of pocket. Says he: “I did everything I should have. I clearly addressed the box containing the bagpipes and Royal Mail labelled it with its own stickers too. It even had an online tracking tag attached to it, and this was supposed to enable the Royal Mail to follow the package’s progress.”
A Royal Mail spokesman admitted that around 15 per cent of ‘lost items’ were sold off. Says he: “Each year 500,000 parcels are undeliverable because they are either incorrectly addressed or have no address or the intended recipient has moved. We do all we can to reunite them with their owners at a cost of £10 million a year.”
You see, it’s all your fault. You can’t buy information like that…
Posted: 18th, June 2007 | In: Money Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
