Royal Mail Industrial Action - PLEASE READ

The backlogged mail is estimated at around 8 million items and growing at 1 million a day. Consequently mail is taking a lot longer to get through to people and to get out of the country, and also via Heathrow, which is where 90% of international mail leaves this country. Particularly hard hit areas are Wolverhampton, London, Southampton, Milton Keynes, Uxbridge, Hull and Slough. Wolverhampton alone has a backlog of over 1 million items, which is understandable when you appreciate that Staffordshire is home to a very large quantity of mail order companies and fulfillment houses.

In theory the backlogged mail should be getting processed in an "oldest first" rota, but in reality we have been told this is not happening, and when mail is being sorted the private postings (from postboxes and Post Offices) are getting done first simply because there's "less of it" and being collected daily from the boxes etc it tends to be smaller sacks, eg the "easy option".

Some areas are particularly badly affected also as post is not being collected from some businesses AT ALL, this is for example affecting us on the Staffordshire Moorlands quite badly. However, the items leaving us from Sussex via Redhill in Surrey do not seem to be getting such serious delays. This is why some of our items will arrive a lot quicker than others, some are sent from Stoke On Trent, some from Horsham, stock is kept in 2 different places.

You will need to allow a reasonable amount of time for deliveries to arrive during this difficult time, and accept our apologies for Royal Mail's actions which are beyond our control.

Royal Mail's website on the action.

Steve and The Retrowarez.com team....

PS this affects ALL our eBay listings, not just DrSteveW, but the miscellaneous Retrowarez IDs also. Perfume/After Shave is unaffected AT PRESENT as this is despatched from Horsham.

PPS Anyone with any more info please add to this blog.