London Underground continues to claim that its savage cuts in ticket office opening hours are 'driven by changes in customer behaviour'. Yet it also continues to drive those changes in customer behaviour itself, in an attempt to justify savage cuts in ticket office opening hours!
The company's latest ruse is to give the shop on the Liverpool Street station C gateline the right to top up Oyster. It's less than ten feet from the ticket office. And, of course, it would be allowed to top up Oyster for whatever amount the customer wants - no £5 minimum here!
This amounts to a form of contracting-out. LU even pays a fee to shops ('agents') to sell the company's own products, reckoning that the fee is cheaper than paying its own directly-employed, unionised staff.
This would be a joke if the implications weren't so serious.
