A Rant on the Village Post Box

[jacey]

So it's like this... Until eight years ago there used to be a post office and general store in the village. In fact, once upon a time, a long long time ago, yours truly was the village postmistress and grocer. I ran it for 4 years while my kids were tiny and in 1984 I decided I wanted to play at something else and sold the business to a lady who used to work for me. Then I ran away (metaphorically speaking) to join a folk trio. Ex-assistant ran it very well for six years, then sold it on to a chap who sank his redundancy pay from an engineering job into it, struggled with it for ten years, but eventually ran it into the ground by the sheer force of his er... personality. (ME: Have you got [item of shopping]. HIM: I've no call for that! ME: You obviously have because I'm asking for it. HIM: Hrmph!)

The building (still ours) is currently in a state of limbo. (OK, we use it to store junk, okay?)

So when we had a village post office it didn't matter that the postbox was a piddly little thing because anyone with big packages to post could just bring them into the shop to have them handed to the postie in the afternoon collection.

But now we don't have a PO in the village our postbox is still a piddly little thing. The aperture is too small to take a standard A4 letter.

When the Royal Mail charges me extra for an A4 letter regardless of its weight, I do believe they should provide me with somewhere to post said letter without having to get the car out and drive to the next village. The aperture on the current village box it too damn small to take an A4 envelope without folding it. (And if i could fold the contents I'd be sending it in A5 because it's cheaper, dammit!)

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Like Charlie, we're fortunate enough to have a post box with a nice big slot outside the sorting office in the middle of town, which is a mere 10 mins walk away. But all the little villages around, which used to have post offices-cum-village shops have lost theirs.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

The fact that post offices in rural villages are being closed is appalling.

The daft thing is that we needn't have lost ours. It wasn't closed for any other reason than the postmaster had run the grocery side of the business down so much that the whole business didn't provide him with enough income.

Most little village post offices are a part-time wage for a full time job. The incumbent gets paid according to the amount of business that goes over the counter, both in and out: stamps sold / pensions paid etc. Now that most people are being persuaded into having their pensions and family allowances paid directly into the bank, that's a whole load of income removed from the postmaster who still has to be at his counter from 9 to 5.30 every day.

Unless the postmaster can supplement his post office income with income from the associated shop (our village was groceries) there isn't a proper income to be had from it.

To be fair to the last postmaster, he was trying to sell groceries to a village in which hardly anyone is seen moving during the day (a vampire village, surely not, you say), but also, the trade is there if you court it. He just seemed to have less and less stock on the shelves until it wasn't worth going in there.

Finally he closed the doors and walked away from the business. He didn't even try to sell it on. I know this for a fact because as the owners of the building (it was a lock-up) he would have had to consult us about transferring the lease.

Of course the manner of his departing was less than ideal - having basically come to the end of one ten year lease and stalled renegotiating the next, he was able to walk away with just three months notice, and then he didn't even clear the premises as he should have done (according to the terms of the lease we no longer had but which still constituted an agreement). He sold what was of any value and then told us he was going away for a week and would clear the rest when he got back. In that week he actually moved away to another county (leaving no forwarding address) and we never saw him again and we ended up paying the council to remove old freezers etc. He even took they key and I had to track him down via some super sleuthing and send him an ultimatum of 'return the key or keep paying rent'. One morning a padded bag arrived through the post with the key in it. No note or explanation.

And that's how we came to have a spare house-sized building tacked on to the side of our house.

I can now give people directions like: Pull up on the forecourt of the building that used to be a post office.
:-)

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I think the Post Office in Dolgellau is as safe as any Post Office is likely to be because having closed all the village Post Offices, it's the only one for miles. It's also a thriving Spar shop of the "open all hours" kind.

It sells papers and bread and milk and enough groceries to make decent meals for the times when you forgot to buy something. It also sells decent cakes from a local bakery and delicacies such as the individual cheesecakes and trifles made by another local company and a decent range of cheese (pre-packaged, but it still sells things the local Co-op doesn't). It has videos for rental and recently got an off-licence.

But running any small business in a rural area seems to be getting increasingly difficult. I hate shopping and will therefore always buy locally if I can to minimise hassle and time spent, but we no longer have a shoe shop or a clothes shop selling my kind of clothes.

We have a shop selling cheap and cheerful fashion probably aimed at local young mums (they have a small range of kids stuff too). There is the nice shop that sells elegant clothes of the, "Oooh, that's nice... Omigod! Is that the price? And you have to hand wash only? Forget it!" kind. And there's the rather faded shop that I always forget about that sells the clothes that farmers over the age of 65 and their wives wear.

I have bought the occasional item in all the town's clothes shops, but to get my usual work clothes (smart but comfortable and MUST be machine washable), I have to look at mail order.

One thing that often seems to happen is that a person who's been running a shop for donkey's years will retire and try to sell on the business, but the income isn't sufficient to pay a living wage and a sizeable mortgage. The people who'd paid off the mortgage years ago when the town was much busier can manage, but for a young person trying to move it, it's hopeless.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

That's exactly it. The price of the actual property makes many small rural businesses unviable.

There are now no shops in our village but a farm shop has recently opened on the edge of the village. The farmer has lived there for years, selling eggs and bags of potatoes. Now it looks as though they're making a real good go of it. Meat, deli, dairy, veg etc., though the vehicle access is horrible (sharp angle, steep ramp down to farmyard, bad vie of traffic when emerging).

Denby Dale is our nearest village with shops and it has quite a good range: a butcher, an open-all-ours mini supermarket which has reasonable fresh veg; a post office and a baker, plus an agricultural feed shop/petfood shop. But all the other shops in the village are staring to get ideas of grandeur. there's now a shiny furniture and interiors shop (and I do mean shiny); two hairdrssers; an expensive kiddies clothing shop; a travel agent; an estate agent; a golf shop. We've just lost the most wonderful hardware shop. You could still buy screws there in ones rather than in blister packs. The old couple that ran it got sick. The lady died and her husband was slowly ailing. Now it's going to be a fabric shop.

On bright spot, though, Denby Dale does have its very own bookshop.
:-)