NB: please click on the links for my ebay listings or etsy shop just under the photo on the right hand column, for prices and postage rates – smile!
As most of you will know by now, Royal Mail, in their bid to make more money, have put up the postage rates, and not even the local post offices I use know what to do with them!
I seem to spend a lot of time peering at the new rate card, which amazingly, wasn’t available to anyone, until the day AFTER the rates went up – because they went up on 1 April, which was Easter Monday, and apparently, so they tell me at the post office I use most, there were instructions NOT to put the leaflets out until then.
My local post office are sticklers for the rules, so they wouldn’t even give me an advance copy, knowing full well that I needed the new rates to change the postage on my ebay & etsy listings – and altho I’d looked them up on line, I couldn’t really make sense of them.
I still can’t. On the one hand, for small & medium parcels – the new categories – you can now post up to 1 kg for the same rate – but on the other hand – you now have to measure the size of the parcels, and there seems to be no practical reason for setting these sizes. I have asked. They don’t seem to make any real difference to the way the parcels are sorted.
The difference they do make is that, with the old rates, I could send a sack full of wool, fibres, rovings, stuffing etc for the same price as the small elephant trinket boxes – now it has to be squeezed into a ball small enough to fit into these odd sample white boxes they’ve all got – 16 cm cubes. I watched yesterday whilst the ‘postmaster’ tried to fit the very squeezed wool stuffing into one, and whilst I had tried my hardest, it was about 0.1 cm larger, and he wouldn’t budge – I had to pay the higher medium parcel rate, which I hand’t charged for!
The other way round it is to lay rovings into long skeins as flat as possible, so the depth of the parcel is no more that 8 cm – which makes for a very floppy bag, and isn’t the best way to avoid tangles.
I was awake in the middle of the night last week and turned on the TV, to find that apart from the BBC or SKY news channels, all there was was the shopping channels, which I normally avoid like the plague – but happened to hit on an ad for a vacuum pack machine, for food. You know, for packaging food for the freezer, or so the ad said, to save leftovers in the fridge!
It occurred to me that it might work for the wool, so I bought one.
Its been sitting beside the weighing machine for a couple of days now, and I still haven’t tried it – but I promise I will do a few tests in the next few days, and see if it makes a difference. If so, I may have to change all the postage rates on my listings again!
What’s really annoying about these rates is that whilst I used to tell you all that I would cap the postage for any parcel weighing up to 750 gm (the old rate), I can’t do the same for parcels up to 1 Kg on the new rate, and thus have to add incremental rates that don’t really work, because if you buy say 200 gms of white merino roving, you get charged extra, so that the 300 gm rate works.
opal
This blog is by way of a long apology for the fact that I’ve had to put the postage rates up, and that, as I try to remember to say on all my listings – PLEASE ASK FOR A REVISED INVOICE BEFORE YOU PAY – because very often I can give you a lower postage rate – whether you live in the UK, or overseas – but if you don’t ask, I’m afraid I can’t refund the difference, once you’ve already paid.
And, by the way – two of my most popular items – the white merino tops / rovings, and the silk “hankies” (for spinning and paper making) are back in stock! And I have added some new colours to the landscape dye stock – but I still can’t manage to stock them all, so please check which ones are available!
And if anyone wants to buy the huge 1 Kg cones of Merino Wool, you can save the postage if you want to meet up at Wonderwool on 27 April!
Like this:
Like Loading...
