Not long ago I went to the local post office to get some books I ordered through Amazon.com. To my surprise I was informed that I have to pay additionally a storage tax (actually some money for keeping my parcel for one or two days in their warehouse).

I did not particularly like the idea because I was not warned about extra cost when I bought online. However, finding out that I would only have to pay RON 0.50 (approximately EUR 0.13) I cooled down, gave the money and wanted to go. I was stopped in the last moment by the officer who needed my company and personal data in order to handwrite an invoice and a receipt for that enormous sum of money. You can actually see it above.

It took 2 minutes of my life for recording such a negligible amount of money. And it pissed me off a little.

I was then wandering what “good” it does to the state owned company. Here you can find a list of them:

· The cost of actual paper (it is self-copying paper in three copies)

· 2 minutes of paid time for the actual employee

· Some other unhappy clients queuing longer time to get their mail

· Some more minutes for handling such bills

· More than 2 minutes of an accountant time to manually fill in books the actual invoice

· Some additional cost related to filing the papers (a folder, box or other support things)

· And surprise, just to close the vicious circle, the cost of storing (some years… close to forever) this paper in some storage space (may not be too much for one paper but they will cumulate over the time into a significant volume)

And some time for me writing this now! (:-))

All in all, they brilliantly managed to have a few unhappy customers and a cost in the end much larger than the actual income. A number of questions popped in my mind!

Why in XXI century nobody in Posta Romana thought about an electronic cash register?

Or, even more customer oriented approach, why nobody thought to offer the customer free storage until a critical value of cost when it would be worth getting some money? For example they shall keep mail free for the first 24-48 hours and increase significantly the fees as time goes on. This way they would encourage people to collect it early (and a great majority would do it) and still get some revenue from the late ones.

I will come back later with another example about change and “innovation” in this state owned company. 

Filed under: A Client in the World by admin