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France’s La Poste hikes price of stamps to make up for dwindling service

France's cash-strapped national postal service is bumping up the price of stamps in 2019.

Published: 27 July 2018 16:06 CEST

France's La Poste hikes price of stamps to make up for dwindling service

Photos: AFP

France's La Poste announced Friday it was putting up the average price of its stamps by 4.7 percent in the coming year.

Normal green stamps will increase by eight cents up to 88 cents (10 percent rise) whilst red registered post stamps will surpass the one euro mark and now cost €1.05, compared to the current 95 cent price.

The price of tracking stickers will remain the same: 40 cents.

For parcels, domestic shipments will see a more moderate rise, 1.4 percent.

“For companies, professional courier rates will increase by 2.5 percent and for direct marketing it will go up by 1.5 percent, to encourage the use of media mail (a special service for sending hardcopies of media)”, La Poste is quoted as saying by Le Figaro.

“The consumer price for La Poste’s Colissimo courier service in metropolitan France for packages weighing less than 250g will remain at the same price as in 2018, €4.95.”

La Poste has tried to reassure members of the public who may feel a little hard done regarding the price hike by reminding them that “the household budget in postal products represents about 0.1 percent of their total budget, about €44 per year on average”.

“The impact of the increase will therefore be of less than €3 per year per household”.

France’s national postal service got permission from the country’s Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications and Post (ARCEP) after the public postal body suffered €550 million in losses in 2018 due to the general lack of demand from the public.

In fact, it’s the third year running that ARCEP has given La Poste the green light to hike prices by 5 percent in order to keep financially afloat.

La Poste will be allowed to carry on doing so until 2022.

Mail volumes in France have dropped by 6 percent a year for the last five years.

How long before sending a letter or a postcard in France or anywhere in the world becomes completely obsolete?

SEE ALSO: The new 'Marianne', France unveils the modern face of the French Republic

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Can you rely on Sweden's Postnord to deliver cards and presents on time?

What can you still send and hope for it to be delivered by Christmas?

The Christmas deadline for letters and parcels outside of Sweden already passed on December 12th, as has the deadline for ordering anything online and hoping for it to arrive on time, with most e-commerce companies advising customers that anything ordered later than December 19th will not arrive in time.

But if you’re sending first-class letters, pre-paid parcels, and small packages for delivery through the letterbox, you can still send them up until December 21st. The same goes for other parcel services such as Postnord MyPack Home, PostNord MyPack Home small, PostNord MyPack Collect, and Postpaket parcels.

And if you’re willing to pay a bit extra, you can send express mail letters, express parcels, and first class ‘varubrev’ small parcels up until December 22nd.

“Those dates still apply. We have written in a press statement that if you send by those dates you can be pretty sure that they will arrive in time,” Anders Porelius, head of press at PostNord, told The Local on Tuesday.

But can you trust Postnord to deliver when they say they will?

Not entirely.

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority, Sweden’s postal regulator, ruled on December 8th that the company was failing to meet its regulatory target of delivering 95 percent of all letters within two working days, with 28 million letters delivered late between June and November.

An investigative documentary by TV4’s Kalla Fakta (Cold Facts) programme, was sent pictures showing huge piles of late, undelivered letters in one of PostNord’s terminals, and interviewed postal workers who said that they were unable to complete their deliveries now they had been moved from daily to every other day, as they had twice as many letters to deliver on the days when they worked.

“You get yelled at by the customers, and rightly so, you get yelled at by your bosses, and you scold yourself because you feel like you’re not able to do enough,” said Emilia Leijon, one postal worker. “We pretty much never manage to deliver a whole satchel. There’s too much post and too little time.”

What is PostNord doing about the delays?

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority has given the company until January 30th to carry out an analysis into why it is not managing to meet its targets, and to draw up an action plan of how it is going to improve.

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