After a weekend spent relaxing – and shopping – work postrooms are braced for an influx of personal deliveries, new analysis suggests. Eight per cent of UK adults get online orders delivered to their workplace every day, while four in 10 do so regularly, the Barclaycard study found.
With shoppers more likely to buy online at the weekend, the analysis of shopper behaviour suggests that post room operatives will be met with a deluge of parcels, many of them personal, as they return to work today after a Bank Holiday weekend.
Findings of the survey, which questioned 1,049 adults across the UK, suggest that 17.1m British shoppers will have spent more than usual online this weekend – and that corporate post rooms could expect to see deliveries nearly double the 3m parcels and packets they usually receive, collectively, each day. More than one in 10 (12%) companies have responded by banning personal items from being delivered to work – but 6% have increased the size of their post rooms and 4% have employed more people to manage post, while 7% have installed Amazon lockers to cope with the demand of post room deliveries.
Barclaycard says its head office in Northampton is also expecting more post today – the number of parcels delivered daily to its workforce has doubled in the last year alone.
Marc Pettican, managing director at Barclaycard, said: “We all love the speed and ease of shopping online, and this is especially true over the Bank Holiday weekend when we’ve got an extra day to shop.
“There’s no denying how handy it is to get our deliveries sent to the work place, so much so that people working in post rooms will likely be feeling quite rushed off their feet, as we anticipate a busy week ahead. With online shopping continuing to increase in popularity, this post room boom looks here to stay.”
Books, says the Barclaycard analysis, are the most likely to be sent to work, and were cited by 47% of those questioned. They were followed by electrical (46%), clothing (37%), music (28%) and make-up (26%). But more unusual deliveries cited in the analysis included live cats and dogs, an axe, a unicycle and an inflatable zimmerframe.
Urban living, suggests the study, is fuelling the rise in personal shopping deliveries to work. Some 16% of those questioned said they no longer had a private letterbox, while 51% said they couldn’t take the time off work to go to a collection office if they missed a delivery.
