Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

How to post a parcel without leaving your house

[iStock]

Here’s a useful tip. Go to the Royal Mail website and you can ask your postman to collect letters or parcels from your home at a cost of 60p per item. You pay for postage online, print a label and book a collection for the following day. Granted, it’s an extravagant way to merely avoid a walk to the postbox, but for special delivery items or parcels it’s a godsend. If you don’t have a printer at home, you can even get your postie to bring a label.

Given that Royal Mail was founded in 1516, I’m not quite sure why it took 500 years to come up with this particular wheeze, but better late than never. In the US, where they have mailboxes rather than slots in the door, postmen have always collected mail. That’s why many American mailboxes have a little flag on them – you raise it to signal when you have post to be collected.

So there’s nothing new about this idea. But it is really useful. Why is no one writing about it? Do simple, useful ideas receive too little attention? In the same way, why is everyone talking about the metaverse when video-conferencing – an established technology – is surely much more economically significant? Frankly I’m not entirely convinced conversations with my colleagues will be much improved by my appearing as a weird 3D avatar with strangely unconvincing facial movements.

Had we not awarded Royal Mail an initial monopoly, would any postal service have become big enough to work?

Do we overvalue novelty? Particularly when experience teaches that most network or ‘platform’ technologies tend to be quite old before they really become useful. This comes down to mathematics. A property of many network businesses is that they can only work once they reach a certain scale. This was true of the universal postal rate introduced by Sir Rowland Hill in 1840, which lost money for many years before attracting enough volume of mail to make it pay.

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