Hastings Post Office in Cambridge Road

Closure of Hastings Post Office?

Local author Kay Green lets off steam about the threat of closure for the Hastings town centre Post Office.

What sort of a daft idea is that! I got the news from the place I get a lot of the most important local news – in the queue in Hastings Post Office. Speaking as one of the not-so-small army of self-employed people running a business that needs all the help it can get, I know the staff in the Post Office very well. They are the reason I understand things like National Insurance contributions and Premium Bond Reclaim forms. The only criticism I have of Post Office staff is that there have never been enough of them since someone came up with the daft idea of trying to make Post Office outlets profitable. Well, at least the permanent queue has become a good place to get local news.

I’m told the Post Office is to be replaced by a facility in a branch of one of the big retailers in Hastings. That’s a bit worrying, firstly because big retailers in Hastings have a habit of disappearing without much warning and secondly because there wouldn’t be room. Let’s take (for a hypothetical example) WH Smiths. Obviously, we’ll need more, rather than fewer, counter staff, because there wouldn’t be room in Smiths for the queues that the Post Office always has now, along with the Post-and-Go machines and the booths where people can sit down to talk to Post Office staff about complicated things like insurance and credit cards, and all the trolleys for parcels that I, and other local business people, send through the Post Office every day.

If it were my hypothetical example, WHS, it would probably be a good idea if they gave up the whole news-agenty, stationery, bookshop-ish angle and gave over the whole shop to the Post Office staff – I assume they would be using the existing staff – it would be a crime to lose them, they’re very knowledgeable. Only this morning, while I was in the Post Office, the women at the counter on both sides of me were making a very good job of helping customers deal with an insurance policy document (to my right) and an issue with a passport photo (to my left). They would also have to give up the notion of making a profit because, clearly, helping people with things like that isn’t something you get paid for. It’s just necessary.

To continue my example – I have tried, and failed, to buy something in Smiths three times in the last few weeks. On the first visit, I couldn’t find any floor staff to ask a question to. On my second, the item in question was marked up as buy-one-get-one-half-price – and they only had one. The assistant I spoke to said “oh well,” and was on the verge of ringing it up on the till when I pointed out that wasn’t acceptable, so I was advised to come back in a week or so and see if they’d got more than one. I did so, and on that occasion (my third visit) the assistant who dealt with me looked the item up on an electronic stock-checker thingy and told me they hadn’t ordered any more because the computer thought they’d got two so I’d have to wait until the computer learned differently, so I gave up and went and bought the item elsewhere. That is, I think, proof that a corporate retailer like Smiths does not have what it takes to run an important service like the Post Office.

Well, I may be wrong. If a plan like that is put in place, I’ll have to get the train to St Leonards or Bexhill to deal with my post every day. I don’t know what people who are too poor or too frail to leap on trains regularly will do, nor do I know how the receptionist at the Creative Media Centre (in Robertson Street, where my business lives) will get on with having to gallop all the way up Queen’s Road with the Centre’s outgoing post instead of doing as she, and most town centre business offices, do now, which is just nip over to the Post Office.

Kay Green is the publisher behind Earlyworks and Circaidy Presses.

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