Boneheaded decisions by Post Office ltd.

In their endless quest to cut costs, Post Office ltd have managed to shoot themselves and a lot of subpostmasters in the feet over the last year or so. Obviously, cutting costs is a great way to turn round ailing businesses. Sadly the amount of business we can do is being impacted by this cost cutting.

A case in point is the foreign exchange.

A lot of branches now have Euros and Dollars on demand. Most of the time, the bureau people check their computers for our levels of currency and then work out our weekly sales and then top us up if we need it. Although the amount they send us for a top up is fixed depending on the season. So if we're selling £10,000 of Euros a week but the seasonal top up level is £7,000 worth then that's all they'll send us. We can ask for extra but it's a pain in the arse.

Anyhoo, back to my point.

The level of Bureau sales dropped a shit load before Christmas. The first stupid thing they did was cancel any top ups if you were holding more than 1.8 weeks of your past few weeks average sales (if you averaged £1,000 per week then you needed to hold £1,800 of currency just in case you had a big order). Next thing they did was drop that down to 1.5 weeks worth. Finally, they cancelled ALL standard orders regardless of how much we had on stock.

This meant that branches like mine that didn't have much of a downturn in sales had to make lots of extra phone calls in order to get some currency sent out. Not only was this a waste of time but you then had to deal with call centre monkeys who seemed to be revelling in their new found power. Any and all exercise of common sense on their part was banned.

An average phone call to one of these plebs went along the lines of:

"I need some more currency for my delivery tomorrow."

"How much do you want?"

"£5,000 worth of Euros please"

"Hmmm, we're showing that you averaged only £3,000 worth last week. We can't send that amount out"

"A customer has specifically asked for £2,500 worth of dollars for next week. Plus, we would have sold more but we ran out because we weren't sent enough in the first place."

"Hmm, I'll send you £3,000 worth and if you need extra you can get an emergency order done."

"Hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnghhh! Goodbye"

Thanks to the fuckwits who made this decision and the bigger fuckwits who enforce it to the exclusion of all common sense, we've missed out on a fair amount of business. This has meant that our weekly average sales have gone down meaning that we're being sent less and less each time.

Hasn't anyone ever thought this decision through at all? On the beancounters spreadsheets the amount of money wasted by having too much cash in the system will be lowered. But, what won't show up is the amount of business lost because we didn't have any currency to sell. Hopefully, it will show up the number of emergency orders the network had to make. Orders which we keep getting memos about telling us not to place them unless we absolutely have to as they're expensive. Well, we have to cos our normal orders are short you twats.