Royal Mail Strike Action
Updated 4th December.
The Communication Workers Union (CWU) has called on its members who collect, sort and deliver the post for Royal Mail to take strike action. This strike action will affect both ourselves in terms of missed collections and you in terms of missed deliveries. The strike action has been called on the following dates:
- Friday 9th December
- Sunday 11th December
- Wednesday 14th December
- Thursday 15th December
- Friday 23rd December
- Saturday 24th December
What does this mean for you and your orders?
In short, we're going to see some delays in getting orders to you, this is inevitable unfortunately. We show estimated delivery dates against every product and every order on the site based on stock knowledge and our experience of the carrier services available. Courier services should largely not be affected by the CWU strike action although we can't fully guarantee that there won't be a knock on effect due to increased parcel traffic through the networks. The dates listed for courier services should still be treated as accurate. Any dates shown for a Royal Mail service should be treated as an optimistic estimate and not be relied upon. With some of the strike action we have seen so far the return to normal service has taken anywhere from a day or so up to a couple of weeks. It is unfortunately out of our control.
As a bare minimum, Royal Mail deliveries will not even be collected from our premises on strike days so they will not enter the network until at least the following non-strike working day. As this is one of the busiest times of the year this also means that the backlog will be large and Royal Mail are not able to guarantee that they will be able to make full collections in the immediate days following strike action.
We can't stress this enough. If you need your order urgently or there is any time constraint then please ensure you check out using a courier service. These are clearly listed and estimated dates shown. If there is no time constraint then by all means continue to use the Royal Mail service but please have some patience. There is absolutely nothing that we will be able to do to speed up a delivery through their system so chasing us will not help the situation.