Have you ever wondered whether the Royal Mail are failing to deliver your post on time? I've long thought it suspicious that I go days without post then a whole batch arrives together, and that bills seem to arrive long after they were posted. But without evidence all this is supposition, so what I really needed to try was...
The Royal Mail Experiment
The Royal Mail Experiment is very simple. You post a letter to yourself every day for a week and see how long they take to arrive in your letterbox.
First you have to decide whether to send them all First Class or all Second Class. I went one better and did one of each.
Even better I managed to persuade someone else to do all the posting for me because they bought all the stamps and that saved me £13.20.
The experiment started on Monday of last week. A First Class letter and a Second Class letter were dropped into the box at a main Post Office in South London. This was repeated every day until Saturday - six pairs of letters in total. I then waited to see when each letter would arrive. Every envelope was numbered so I knew exactly what had been sent when.
Would there be an issue or were the Royal Mail meeting their targets?
Results
Day 1: Monday
Sent 1st Class (1) 2nd Class (1)
Received
And we're off.
Day 2: Tuesday
Sent 1st Class (2) 2nd Class (2)
Received
Not a good start. The 1st class letter should have arrived the next day but it didn't.
Day 3: Wednesday
Sent 1st Class (3) 2nd Class (3)
Received 1st Class (1) 1st Class (2) 2nd Class (1)
Two 1st Class letters arrived together, one a day late, one on time. The first 2nd class letter arrived after two days in transit.
Day 4: Thursday
Sent 1st Class (4) 2nd Class (4)
Received 1st Class (3) 2nd Class (2)
A 1st Class letter arrived after one day, a 2nd Class letter arrived after two.
Day 5: Friday
Sent 1st Class (5) 2nd Class (5)
Received 1st Class (4) 2nd Class (3)
Again a 1st Class letter arrived after one day and a 2nd Class letter arrived after two. We seemed to be settling into a pattern.
Day 6: Saturday
Sent 1st Class (6) 2nd Class (6)
Received 1st Class (5)
The 1st Class letter again arrived after one day but this time no 2nd Class letter joined it.
I'll skip Sunday because that's not a working day.
Day 7: Monday
Sent
Received 1st Class (6) 2nd Class (4) 2nd Class (5) 2nd Class (6)
And with that all the letters had turned up. It was a bit odd because three 2nd class letters arrived simultaneously, one after three days, one after two days and one after one day.
So, the results class by class...
1st Class
Royal Mail target: 93% of First Class mail must be delivered within one working day of collection.
83% of the First Class mail was delivered in one day, and just one letter took two days. This is roughly in line with the Royal Mail's target and suggests that First Class mail can generally be relied on.
2nd Class
Royal Mail target: 98.5% of Second Class mail must be delivered within three working days of collection.
100% of the Second Class mail was delivered within three days, perfectly in line with the Royal Mail's target. Most of the letters actually arrived in two days, and one arrived the very next day. This was a good performance.
Sidenote: Two of the twelve letters arrived unfranked. Six of the letters were postmarked 'Croydon Mail Centre' and four of the letters were postmarked 'Mount Pleasant Mail Centre', despite the fact they were all posted in the same place. Tuesday and Friday were Mount Pleasant days.
Conclusions
1) Only one of the twelve letters missed the Royal Mail target - the First Class letter posted on the first day. This is better than I was expecting.
2) I received letters on five consecutive days. This confirms that, last week at least, my mail was not being hoarded at Bow sorting office and delivered in batches.
The evidence from the experiment suggests that First Class mail, Second Class mail and postal delivery can generally be relied on. So that's good. But you'd need to do a lot more Royal Mail Experiments to properly confirm this.
