@Peter I hope you will forgive me for asking a question which touches on Brexit.
I still have a company in the UK and yesterday I needed to send a dossier consisting of approximately 25 sheets of A4 paper plus a cheque and paperclip to a UK Government department.
Normally I would put the dossier in an envelope and then at the post office I would buy a plastic envelope to put it in. I believe it then goes by Chronopost and can be tracked. I picked up what I thought to be the right envelope before the man at the post office asked where the package was going. I told him UK." Ahh" he said, “those are only for Europe I have to get you one from out the back, but they’re very expensive”
How right he was, the envelope was almost identical to the EU ones but it was €89 as opposed to €29 for the EU ones. So my question is "who gets this €60 extra, why and how do they justify it?
Btw they didn’t get it from me I sent it by normal post €16
Why do you put it in a second ‘plastic envelope’?
I’ve never heard of such.
It’s a pre paid plastic envelope a bit like those used by DHL and DPD which is why I am guessing it is a Chronopost thing for tracking.
I believe Chronopost and DPD have some sort of tie up.
Not sure what that €89 service is. Here we have just airmail, and £16 might be about right for say a 1kg package, sent by a tracked service (signature on final receipt, but not tracked at every step; no Post Office offers that AFAIK). Or we have the usual couriers, DHL etc, and then £90 might sound about right, and of course that is tracked and trackable at every step of the journey. These are the options here for many years.
Nobody would give the Post Office 90 quid; that would be totally dumb. You would use DHL and it would arrive the very next day, anywhere in Europe.
And airmail to France from here costs the same as it always did. We currently have some complications for sending packets to the EU (Royal Mail is using a different website for booking those; we pay £400/year for a daily collection from the office) but the prices have not changed. The weight limit for airmail is 2kg as always.
So I have no idea who gets the extra €60 but if this is normal tracked airmail i.e. ~5 days then this sounds like a bit of “brexit opportunity / shaft the UK / best time to kick a man is when nobody likes him / private enterprise” 
It takes just 1 guy at the top of the French post office to set this up… I am sure the UK didn’t ask for this; after all, it is only at the UK end that the package may be examined by Customs. There is no extra work in France.
Probably no different to when I used to buy disposable gloves for 3p (for working in the workshop, on the aircraft, etc) and now they are 10p. This is because of CV19 which created a lot of demand for this stuff. The gloves still come from China for perhaps 1-2p although China is also cashing in on their “contribution to the world economic growth in 2020” and doubling their prices when they can.
DPD is a joke too. The only reason anybody uses them is because they are cheap, but 90 quid is far from cheap. At that price level I would just use DHL FEDEX UPS.
There’s no extra work in the UK either, documents only mail items don’t need a customs declaration.
Your posts confirm what I thought, someone, but I don’t know who is profiteering and why anyone should think that anyone would pay this extortionate amount is beyond me.
@Peter I don’t think that this can be put in the shaft the UK category as it appears to me to be the French who are being shafted.
You are of course correct about PPE and hand gel and masks etc. Here masks were free when they became available, handed out by the local mayor. I bought a full face protector in the UK at a cost of £5 when my wife bought exactly the same thing in France for €0.99. And we were paying €1 for hand gel which in the UK was being sold at £5 for exactly the same quantity. PCR tests in France are free whereas a Brit friend has just paid £120 for a test at Boots in the UK.
Somebody, somewhere is blatantly profiteering and I do wonder if there is a correlation between the number of deaths from Covid in the UK and their ability to buy the protection they need.
@gallois et. al., I suspect that this mailing issue may be either a French thing or an international postal issue. Reason I say that is that I have noticed a massive increase in mailing documents to France from the US. I have to do this occasionally and the last time I did it (about 1 1/2 years or so ago) the price had increased about 5-fold. As it’s not a regular thing for me I have no idea when that price hike came in. Mind you, post-Brexit the UK is treated the same as the US (or any other non-EU country), so that might well be it.
gallois wrote:
So my question is "who gets this €60 extra, why and how do they justify it?
My guess is that as the UK is no longer a member of the EU, there are no EU regulation of fees and they are raising the price because they can. (Well, customs processing might add to the cost, but hardly for €60.)
I expect a similar hike in mobile phone roaming fees for EU subscribers visiting the UK. The phone companies will raise prices because they can.
there are no EU regulation of fees
€20 to €90 is going some… No; this is somebody taking the p1ss. The UK joining the EU didn’t change postal prices (if anything they went UP) and they haven’t gone up now that is has left. And there are mutual agreements between post offices for inter-billing so if this was “official” the UK would have to dramatically increase airmail to France in order to be able to compensate the French post office for its part of the route.
It actually sounds like a private initiative within the French post office retail arm.
I expect a similar hike in mobile phone roaming fees for EU subscribers visiting the UK
They have said they won’t. Vodafone UK for example is not treating UK travel to Europe as “roaming”. And it has not done so for ages, charging Switzerland at the EU rate. The places you get ripped off are Serbia, Montenegro and Albania
