daily life: letters from the edge

The Royal Mail get a lot of stick, and although they often annoy me, I feel most of it is a tad extreme. Yes, the Postie arrives at 12pm on a good day, yes the Postie steals your valuable parcels, and yes a letter would arrive faster if you strapped it to the back of a sloth .

But where I draw the line is what I call the 'Royal Mail Tax'. If you ever import items into the UK exceeding the customs threshold (around £17) you have to pay import tax, VAT .etc. Fair enough (although they included P&P in the price). But then the Royal Mail charge you a 'Processing Fee' to take the items to HR Revenue and Customs for processing, and to collect the fees from you at your sorting office. This is possibly fair, it probably costs about 50p for RM to do this. But how much does RM charge you for this 'service'?


You probably guessed wrong, it's actually a whopping £8. How do the Royal Mail justify this tax, that often dwarfs the VAT and Customs charges.

Example, I imported some CDs from the U. S of A, with P&P they were about £20 (just over the threshold), the customs charges were about £4 so it was £24 (still cheaper than Amazon.co.uk), but then RM stuck their Royal Mail Tax on top bringing it to an eye watering £32.
How can the RM charge me £8 when the customs charges were only £4? If the item is £200 you could argue the £8 is small, but here it was nearly 50% of the cost of the items.

Royal Mail, I declare WAR on your TAX. Tell me if you think this was worth the hassle.