I only want to post a flipping letter! (Post Office)

Member Name: stuff10

Product:	Post Office
Date:	11/08/09 (68 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some staff okay

Disadvantages: Grubby shops, high prices, queues, some useless staff

The Post Office is a strange beast. Originally designed to allow the general public to send letters from one place to another it now offers more products and services than a Swiss army knife!

You can get car insurance, house insurance, pet insurance, life insurance, travel insurance, travel money, broadband, phone line, loans, credit cards, mortgages, lottery tickets... and you can actually post a letter there too... if you must!

I'm a regular user of the Post Office, mainly due to my trading on eBay and PlayTrade. My view of the Post Office varies from branch-to-branch: the local high street ones seem to be pretty good at doing their job, but the one in Crystal Peaks shopping centre (in Sheffield) is a nightmare. I'm regularly queued for upwards of 5 minutes which I wouldn't mind if it were not for the fact that a) nobody in front of me is actually posting anything and b) you can see staff sat around behind the glass doing absolutely nothing!

To be fair though, my experiences with Crystal peaks are somewhat cancelled out by the helpful guy who works in the Killamarsh branch, which I visit most often. The guy in Killamarsh only has one arm but he's infinitely quicker and more helpful than the women they employ in Crystal Peaks.

The branches around me are all in a state of disrepair and need a serious amount of cash injected into them to take them up to modern standards. Helpfully, they sell packing material (padded envelopes, bubblewrap, parcel paper etc), but unhelpfully this is all extortionately priced! The padded envelopes I use are sold at 8 for £1 in Poundland, in the Post Office they're 65p each!! 65p x 8 = £5.20 - over five times as much in Poundland!

As you can probably tell, I'm not the greatest fan of the Post Office, but unfortunately there's no real alternative - I'll keep going there as longs as I keep needing to post things!

Summary: Where else am I gonna post things?