Use Your Local Pub to receive Parcels

This seems like an idea that could be expanded with a little imagination, and turn some of our struggling local pubs into thriving centres of service for local communities.

Pint and parcels at the local pub

The UK’s Royal Mail makes some 40 million unsuccessful first-time delivery attempts per year, causing no end of hassle for the consumers waiting to receive those packages. At the same time, Britain is losing about 52 of its pubs per week to recession-induced closures. Taken together, those two statistics underlie the creation of UseYourLocal, a new service backed by British brewer Scottish & Newcastle that facilitates package delivery to the local pub.

Launched this spring, UseYourLocal aims to give consumers more reasons to visit their local pub, effectively helping to put the UK’s 90,000 pubs and clubs back at the heart of the community. For GBP 50 (plus VAT) per year, participating pubs get their own website?including an easy way to email news and special offers to local customers?along with the ability to receive customers’ package deliveries and a point-of-sale kit to help them register. Customers who sign up for the free service can then stay abreast of happenings in their favourite pubs as well as see who else has joined and send parcels to people at other registered outlets, with tracking along the way and email notification once their package has arrived. Perhaps best of all, of course, is that rather than waiting in line at the local postal sorting office to claim their undelivered packages, they can rediscover the charms of the local pub instead.

The company’s website explains: “At UseYourLocal we truly believe that local pubs and clubs can be a real force for good in our local villages, towns and cities and hope that this is just the first in a series of great ideas aimed at finding creative solutions to help breathe life back into local communities.”

More than 500 pubs across Britain have already signed up with UseYourLocal; how about bringing something similar to the local pubs in your neck of the woods…?

Which other services would be well suited to making use of the local pub as a place to drop in and kill several birds with one stone?