THE new Melksham Post Office on Bank Street will open its doors on Saturday 3rd May, it has been announced.
The new location is just 250 metres from the current site on Church Street which will officially close on Friday 2nd May at 5.30pm. The new store will open the following morning at 8.00am.
The move, which comes following a public consultation, is part of a major modernisation programme across the Post Office network designed to ensure Post Office branches are sustainable, profitable and no longer reliant on Government funding. The modernisation programme will also mean longer opening hours at the new location with an extra 14 hours a week of service with opening times being 8am-6pm from Monday to Saturday.
The new Melksham Post Office will have four serving positions. These will be a mixture of one screened and three open-plan counters. The same range of current Post Office services will continue to be available.
There will also be no compulsory redundancies as a result of the move, say the Post Office. Post Office Ltd is working closely with colleagues to ensure their needs are met, whether that is a transfer to the new employer or redeployment in the Post Office, they say. Roger Gale, Crown network general manager said, “We are committed to keeping a Post Office branch in Melksham and to maintaining the same levels of service for our customers. We believe the best way for us to do this is to change the way we operate it, so following the move it will be run by Crab & Andrews Retail Ltd rather than by us directly.”
Crab & Andrews offer greeting cards, stationery, packaging and confectionery, and currently operate two Post Office branches from within their stores in Bristol. They regard their post offices as vital to community services.
They say they have demonstrated that they will be able to successfully run the branch in Melksham, delivering excellent standards of customer service, with trained staff promoting products and services in a modern environment, over extended opening hours.
Recent Post Office research shows that customer satisfaction levels are just as high for customers visiting franchise branches as those who access Post Office services via the Crown network. Following the move of the Post Office, the Royal Mail sorting office will remain in its current location. This means that customers can continue to collect undelivered items of mail from the sorting office as they do currently.
