Royal Mail loses Amazon contract

Amazon has ended its contract with Royal Mail to deliver parcels weighing more than 500 grams.
Royal Mail has lost a crucial contract with its second largest customer, the online retailer Amazon, as a wave of strikes threaten parcel deliveries in the busy pre-Christmas sales period.

The news comes on the eve of a national strike announcement by the Communication Workers Union that is likely to bring the simmering industrial dispute to the boil and further disrupt deliveries across the country.

But a backlog of undelivered mail has worried customers, particularly small businesses and internet retailers who argue that the unpredictable nature of the strikes has led to a collapse in reliability. The loss of this business will be a severe blow to Royal Mail, which was relying on the growth of online shopping to compensate for the decline of its letters business due to rising email use.

Customers of eBay have already been particularly vociferous, claiming the strikes are causing damage to small businesses that suffer negative feedback and lose their online reliability ratings.

Amazon.co.uk has cancelled its long-term contract to use the Royal Mail for parcels over 500 grams and will use a rival service, Home Delivery Network (HDN), which also delivers for Tesco and Argos.

Two years ago Royal Mail lost a smaller Amazon contract worth £8m to deliver second class parcels during the last national strike, but fought hard to win the business back, claiming improved industrial relations. Losing the new, bigger contract will exacerbate the operator’s financial woes, which lay behind its need to cut staff, but more worryingly sends a dangerous signal to other suppliers about Amazon’s faith in the network during the crisis.

Royal Mail declined to comment.

Man Booker Prize won by Hilary Mantel !

The hottest favourite in the 40-year history of the Man Booker Prize edged home last night when Wolf Hall was named the winner in a secret ballot by three votes to two.

The judges described Hilary Mantel’s 650-page doorstopper about political manoeuvring at the court of Henry VIII as an “extraordinary piece of storytelling . . . a modern novel that happens to be set in the 16th century”.

Mantel, 57, is a seasoned novelist who has been shortlisted for the Orange prize and the Commonwealth prize for fiction. Wolf Hall revolves around Thomas Cromwell, the bullying, quick-thinking son of a Putney drunk and blacksmith who becomes Henry VIII’s most powerful adviser.

She said last night: “I hesitated for such a long time before beginning to write this book, actually for about 20 years … At this moment I am happily flying through the air.”

Booksellers and readers alike will hope that Mantel’s intention to write a sequel comes to fruition sooner than her promised novel about Jean-Paul Marat, “guest star” of A Place of Greater Safety. Seventeen years after her French Revolution epic was published there is no sign of the follow-up.Wolf Hall was also doing brisker business than its rivals at the tills. Initially it was outsold by Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger but, according to Waterstone’s, sales of the book increased by 500 per cent after it was shortlisted. It has sold six times as well in e-book format as its nearest rival.

Despite its highbrow reputation, the prize was founded to sell books.

We can guarantee that this will be at the top for a lot of peoples Christmas list … a good one when you don’t know what to buy the older of the family members …

… here you go Dad try your hand on this.