The staggering realisation was that, despite having spent billions on security measures, no-one had thought about the fact that passengers airliners typically carry lots of transatlantic mail - letters and small parcels. And these parcels are not particularly rigorously checked.
When this hit the headlines, US Homeland Security understandably put a ban on passenger aircraft carrying parcels into the USA. Unfortunately this was just before the busiest time of year.
So Royal Mail, rather than finding an alternative way of sending items by air, decided to send a lot of stuff by sea.
Trouble is they didn't tell anyone what was going on. (This story about them sending vast amounts of stuff by sea only emerged much later). Consequently, vast numbers of people ordered items from companies via the Internet as Christmas presents expecting them to arrive in time to be excitedly unwrapped on Christmas day. Thousands of companies, like mine, happily sent things off using Royal Mail Airmail expecting them to arrive as usual, in plenty of time.
Unfortunately ships are quite a bit slower than planes so they never did. A deluge of unhappy customers panicking a few days before Xmas resulted and then a huge number of very expensive refunds.. It must have cost the UK economy millions and the tears of poor American children without their Christmas presents must have caused rivers to overflow all across the good ole US of A.
I have been meaning to blog about this staggering complete incompetence for some time because for some reason it never made the news headlines.. so probably this little footnote will have to do.
Royal Mail - You are incompetent gits who ruined America's Christmas.
I was prompted to write this by a customer who contacted me today to tell me he had finally received the item he ordered in late November today..
Nice one Royal Mail. Oh and before I forget thanks for putting your prices up by about 10% again in April - you really deserve the extra cash not.. Gits.
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