Choices

The news regarding Audlem Post Office has been met by villagers with a mix of shock, sadness and a huge dose of gratitude for the great service, delivered with an always cheerful disposition by Andrew and Lynne.

I would, of course, like to add my thanks and sincere good wishes for the future to the Smith family.

Amongst the sadness is inevitably a sense of frustration with the direction of travel of Post Office Limited and their well-publicised squeeze on fees etc that unquestionably added to the financial pressures that Andrew mentioned in his statement.

A Google search of 'post office closes' reveals that the story is being repeated the length and breadth of the UK. One thing about free market economics is that it is based on choices and the pound talks – I wonder whether we (that's the villagers) could have exercised our choices differently on occasions and so made our pound talk a little more loudly?

As I understand from looking at the Post Office Limited website it seems the revenue streams of a post office are largely those derived from its retail offering, any lottery sales and then income from the post office services themselves.

The latter are paid in the form of 'fees' from Post Office Limited based upon the transactions and activity handled on its behalf by the local post office. Typically, half of those fees come from postal activity and half from other activity; taxing cars, bills processing, personal banking, moneygrams, currency exchange etc.

The 'business opportunity' of Audlem Post Office is advertised on the POL website with fees paid by Post Office Limited estimated at about £14,000 per year. That £14,000 figure is the one that we as villagers choose to create by making choices about all of the activity and transactions that are possible to do in the local post office:

• Did we choose to tax our car by telephone/online or in the post office?
• Did we choose to post our parcels at the village post office or in the one in centre of the town where we work?
• Did we choose to send emails instead of physical Christmas cards?
• Did we choose to move all of our bill payments online?
• Did we get our Euros or dollars at the airport or via an ATM abroad or did we get them in the post office?

Of course we all have lives outside the village as well as inside it and none of us, realistically, spend all of our pound in the village but I think we should be asking ourselves whether we exercise enough of our choice in the right way in this regard. I for one did not have an entirely guilt free conscience when I heard the news about the post office.

We love having the shops and businesses; they add so much to village life and so we should at least always be challenging our choices:

• Can I get my haircut in the village?
• Can I buy my newspaper in the village?
• Can I get my dry cleaning done in the village?
• Can I get the meat for the BBQ in the village?

We will not of course always exercise the option to use the village but unless we do it at least some of the time then those choices will eventually be removed.

David Parry

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