Greed still drives the companies

December 16th, 2008

After posting my comment on BT I thought I would check the telephone line in my new flat, which I bought from an 87-year-old widow. I plugged in a spare phone to her BT socket.

To my surprise it was still live, although I took possession of this flat on October 31st. But she is still being charged her rental, and would have to pay, for calls I made to the many premium charge lines available.

It was a BT line. But my vendor, shortly before she sold to me, had changed her line from BT to the Post Office. This was partly because she visited her local post office for their other services, so was an easy prey for their plea that she should transfer her phone to them.

When Thatcher privatised the Post Office in the 1980s it made millionaires of the men who bought it. But it left a serious problem for the other services which the Post Office provided. Like local post offices, where people could collect their pensions, etc. And get their mail delrivered to their door.

Not a very profitable business, in the case of the post. So the Blair/Brown government pushed the Royal Mail to run the postal service as an ‘efficient’ business. So now the Royal Mail, and its subsidiiary, the Post Office, are trying to cash in on the business, where the money is. On the phone.

For which they have no expertise whatever. So they have made a mess of it. And they can never hope to compete with the whizz kids of the old Post Office, who went off to make their fortunes with BT.

But they are still taking money from my vendor. And have still not turned off her line, though she is no longer there, and I could be building up huge bills at her expense.

So the bosses at Royal Mail should realise that they can never compete with BT, Virgin, etc on phones, but their job is to deliver the post and run the post offices. Not to waste money on trying to compete with the likes of BT in telephones and therefore get into the big money.

The mail is not big money.

It is a pubic service.

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