[Normille]

  >Royal Mail chairman Keith Williams... said first-class stamps will have to rise “considerably” to pay for Royal Mail deliveries on Saturday.

  >He said: “The cost to us is driven in part by [the fact that the] volume of letters has declined. You're delivering the same number of letters over six days when you could be doing it over five. So that is forcing up stamp prices.”

This is the same argument Royal Mail always trot out. It conveniently ignores the fact that, while it's true that people are writing and sending less letters than they used to, the volume of other 'stuff' being sent through the mail has gone up about eleventy billion percent in recent years, thanks to the amount of online shopping being done.

If Royal Mail can't turn a profit in this kind of market, they shouldn't be in business.

[fragmede]

Why do they need to turn a profit? Do we ask libraries to? Do we charge the roads property tax for taking up so much space?

[kennyadam]

they didn't need to until they got privatised. public services being privatised pretty much never ends well... except for the rich owners who have they're losses subsided by the public and keep any profits.

[zajio1am]

Or they just say that they cannot subsidize their letter-delivering business from their package-delivering business.