Parcels couriers - what are your horror stories?

[Captain Kernow]

CTMK has recently sold a wooden tea trolley on the internet to someone in the North of England. The purchaser arranged for a parcels courier to come and collect it from our house.

 

Last week, CTMK waited in at home virtually all day for the pick-up, which was billed as 'between 0900 and 1300 hrs'. In the event the courier arrived at 1500 hrs and, finding that the purchaser has failed to send us some bar coded labels, refused to take the item.

 

We re-arranged it for today, and again she waited in all day, again for a '0900 to 1300' pick-up, only for UPS to turn up at 1600 hrs. Fortunately, the bar coded labels had arrived this time, and the item is now on it's way.

 

The UPS man was unsympathetic both times (same person) and had poor customer service skills.

 

Although we weren't the 'customer' as such, we shall certainly never seek to use their 'services' in the future.

 

[trisonic]

Afraid I don’t have any! I received a delivery from Amazon yesterday - Sunday. They updated info on my smartphone, when it was on truck and it pinged when he dropped it on my doorstep.

 

I suppose I’m lucky but I suspect UPS (they were not the ones delivering yesterday) have different management/training over here where it almost seems a national institution.

 

Best, Pete.

[BG John]

One of my best accounts clients some years ago was a franchisee of a courier company, who announced one day that he'd had enough, and walked away from his company letting it go bust. It was a sudden and quite big drop in my income!

[jonny777]

I'm afraid that my involvement with couriers is more unintentional comedy than horror.

 

One of my neighbours are away a lot and I often take parcels for them when they are not at home.

 

One morning the postwoman called to say would I take a package for the neighbour's neighbour on their opposite side to us, and asked if I knew they were away.

I said I didn't know but it was quite possible, and she said there was a parcel outside their front door and it might be a good idea if I took that as well. We walked around and their recycling box was still outside from the previous day, so I said I would and put a note through their letterbox to say what had happened - which I did.

 

Later that day there was a knock at the door, and the neighbour was there so I gave him the parcel; only to have him explain that he had left it there for a courier to pick up in the middle of the day.

 

I apologised profusely, and although he was obviously irritated he seemed to blame the postwoman rather than me, although she was only trying to be helpful as well.

[TheSignalEngineer]

In our experience UPS are one of the better ones we get. It's all down to the individual staff. RM used to be good, now usually rubbish but the stand-in postie this morning saw me going out and called over that he had a packet for me, so I wouldn't have to go to collect it tomorrow.

[The Stationmaster]

Apart from the occasional rude ones and the seemingly frequently brain-dead ones the most frustrating was a bloke I caught leaving a very large package in our porch without ringing the bell or knocking on the door.  Fortunately I heard him and got to the door before he reached the gate. =

'What's that?'

'It's for you neighbour, they're out'

'How do you know - this isn't even for an address in this road but for the next road'

'You could take it to them'

'No, that's you're job - now get on and do it before I kick it over and break it'

 

He did,, and then drove off in the wrong direction.  It seems that in his case his lack of customer skills was only matched by either his inability to read or his sheer cheek.

[TEAMYAKIMA]

I find the RM to be excellent .... HERMES are a disgrace.

 

The RM leave a card if I'm not in ... I can arrange another delivery or even a change of delivery address.

 

Hermes use local delivery people who use ther own cars.

 

I ordered 10 aerosols of Dullcote ..... they were sent by HERMES ...... I was upstairs in the modelling room .... I heard a knock on the door ....... I went downstairs immediately to find my parcel on the doorstep and the delivery woman getting into her car and driving off...... our front gate was open and the pavement is only 4ft from our front door ..... an invitation to steal the parcel!

Edited February 9, 2015 by TEAMYAKIMA

[Dave47549]

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Edited October 3, 2021 by Dave47549
Removed pointless guff

[roundhouse]

Royal actually managed to catch me at home on Saturday...that must be a first!

 

Parcel force tend to take the parcels to one of our post offices and you can't then rearrange delivery etc especially annoying when they leave it in the Post Office inSmiths in the shopping centre. Smiths is open Sunday but not the post office bit.

 

Luckily this time they left it at a small sub post office and my other hslf collected it on Sunday but if we are doing shows or beer hunting then it could be weeks before we can get to a local post office by which time they will have sent the parcel back!!!

 

Our favourite is a royal Mail as the sorting office behind the station is very handy to go collect undelivered parcels.

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

...Suffice to say that before being airfreighted from Heathrow, the crate & contents were smashed beyond redemption...

Similar experience in commercial ops in my past. I was dispatched to 'investigate and correct' what was going amiss, and without even arranging what I might best inspect, watched a courier's van colide with and run over some of the packages awaiting collection. What's that saying about paying peanuts?

[Spitfire2865]

Ive had terrible experiences with USPS over here. Laziness and braindeadness are rampant. My house gets mail from across town, for someone named Randolf (who has never lived in my house), and once for a different state all together! Knocking on the door is apparently unnecessary as well.

But the most annoying thing is their process for redelivery.

At uni, Ive had to reschedule a delivery as theyve tried deliver to an address which can be classed as a buisness before 8 in the morning. No no ones there to collect it!

Ive also practically lost packages due to failure to scan mail to keep tracking details up to date.

Edited February 9, 2015 by Spitfire2865

[jonny777]

I did have a problem, not with a parcels courier but with an online supermarket delivery driver.

 

I booked my hour delivery slot for my online groceries, and waited on the day. When no one turned up, and after giving them an hours grace I phoned the depot only to be told that the driver had returned to the warehouse because my address didn't exist. I asked how they knew it didn't exist when I was living there, but they thought I was being funny.

 

Eventually, they agreed for the delivery driver to contact me personally, during which conversation he told me that he had been to the T-junction where he was supposed to turn left, but could only turn right and that was a cul-de-sac so he couldn't turn right at the end of that road.

 

I asked why he could not turn left at the T-junction and he said it was not the same road, and I assured him it was. He replied that he knew it wasn't because he had been there. I said that it certainly was the same road because not only had I been there but I had lived in the same house (that apparently didn't exist) for 25 years. After about 5 minutes of him insisting that he was right, he eventually relented and said he would try it again - which he did and turned up 20 minutes later.

 

However, there was little or no communication from him - he just gave me the carrier bags and left sharpish.

[Horsetan]

..... HERMES are a disgrace....

Hermes once took 26 days to deliver a parcel to me, having assured the sender that it would only take 48 hours.

[BigAndy]

I bought a Bachmann 47 from a well known model shop a couple of years back and it was subsequently depatched for delivery with Royal Mail as the couriers.

 

A few days later, I returned home and found one of their 'you weren't in' cards on the doormat. It had some sort of indecipherable scrawl written on it, that looked as though a spider had dipped it's feet in ink and had then gone for a drunken ramble across the note.

 

Since I was the first one home from work, I decided to go out of the back door and down to my workshop at the bottom of the garden. In doing so have to go across the patio enabling me to look down the passageway between the house and the garage. On glancing down the passage, I saw a 47 sized parcel at the foot of the 6' gate which separates the passageway from the drive. Unable to believe my eyes, I hurried down to the parcel as it had been raining heavily for most of the day.

 

Yep, it was my brand new 47, which was now soaking wet due to it being out in the rain for most of the day. The main thing that fuelled my anger to eruption point was the fact that my loco had been thrown over the top of the gate and had landed onto the hard flags on the ground ( It had obviously been thrown over as the gate goes to the floor and there was a big dent in one corner of the box ) and then left to rot in the rain all day.

 

I immediately phoned the sorting office and spoke to the 'manager' who couldn't have given two f***s about my dmaged box and also the fact that the impact had broken off the brake gear along the bottom of the bogies.

 

I verbally wiped the floor with the bloke, which got me nowhere either but made me feel slightly better. I never got any recompense for it and heard no more about my complaint.

 

Is it any wonder that RM are in the state they're in.

 

cheers

 

Andy

[station cat]

Amazon Logistics I still have no clue where they delivered my book to. I went round plenty of neighbours asking but nobody had seen it. Still at least the replacement was promptly delivered (via Royal Mail).

[NGT6 1315]

Oh dear, those reports about your experience with courier services do leave me speechless... I've certainly made a sizeable number of mail orders over the years and thus far, I have yet to have any problem even remotely as bad as those you describe. I do keep reading about complaints German customers have with our courier services, but so far, I either seem to have been totally lucky or these complaints represent a very small but glaring minority of cases. Touch wood things remain that way… 

 

In fact, one of the DHL Express guys here has confided that he, too, is into railway modelling and wonders what might be in those parcels from Japan I get from time to time!

[Butler Henderson]

Think its shows they all have their idiots on the delivery run, it only takes one to give the rest a bad name.

[Spitfire2865]

Nothing pisses me off more than unprofessional professionals. Businesses should act like businesses, not children.

[Phil Bullock]

Still waiting for the PO to deliver some weathered minerals I posted first class 11 days ago....

 

Phil

[Horsetan]

Nothing pisses me off more than unprofessional professionals.....

Meanwhile, at Crapita.....

[Captain Kernow]

Although the item I described was essentially a bit of furniture (never again, by the way, it will be local sales only if it happens again..), the sending of model railway items by post or courier is something that I will be doing again in the near future, as I clear one or two items out from the collection.

 

Do you think that paying for the item to be tracked and insured is worth it? I have done this in the past, but fortunately have never had to claim...

[mezzoman253]

Hermes:Depends if you are in. If you are the process is fine. if you are not it can degenerate into a farce.

 

The first time a seller sent stuff by Hermes I was in and all was fine. The second time, same seller, I wasn't and the "postcard written by the drunken spider" was pushed through. Eventually it was delivered but the courier wasn't happy having to come back.

 

The third time I was out and the parcel was sitting on the side the porch, and a postcard saying " left by the side of the porch" was pushed through. Anyone could have walked off with it.

 

So I was worried that after recently buying something from eBay, the seller mailed me with Hermes tracking info'! But I was in and as with the first item, everything was fine.

 

Moral is stay in 24/7 or don't have anything delivered, unless you want hassle.  Applies to most deliverers.

 

Rob

Edited February 10, 2015 by mezzoman253

[petethemole]

Mrs mole and I are separated but she uses this address for her mail order stuff as I'm in most mornings whereas she's out a lot. The Saturday of the Southampton show I was there, so not in. Later I found a Hermes card on the hall floor. All it said on it was "GATE SIDE" presumably meaning "side gate". No parcel was visible outside or inside the gate (6ft high, solid wood, no gap underneath) which fronts the passage between us and next door. The people next door hadn't seen it. The tracking info came back as "left in outhouse", probably meaning the side passage. Further enquiries via the seller came back with "put over fence". We don't have a front fence as the estate was designed as open plan, but some people including next door, have low fences. A parcel left there would be in plain view and accessible, so if that was where it was left, it walked. The seller sent a replacement so Mrs mole isn't out of pocket. The other day I took another Hermes delivery, from the regular local lady and asked her about it. She doesn't work weekends and was concerned about it and said she'd report it up the line. Apparently they have some new weekend staff locally. The regular lady is okay and will actually return to make a drop if I'm not in, so I think poor service is partly down to lax management.

 

Our posties are excellent.

 

Pete

[AndrewC]

Like most business, when things go right they go unnoticed. When things go wrong on the other hand, how the business handles it determines whether or not to use them again. We've had a few minor problems with just about every company out there.

 

The worst for us is definitely Hermes. As mentioned previously, if you are home and standing in the doorway from 07:00 to 22:00 you may actually get your parcel. However, these cockwombles are the worst. Their business model is to despatch via independent drivers. These can be anything from a professional with experience and a van, to some muppet with L plates and a D reg Skoda. We seem to get the muppet. There are 2 divisions, Hermes and MyHermes. These seem to be unable to talk to each other. Once a parcel has gone from Hermes to MyHermes all tracking and communication are lost. As soon as the muppet gets the parcel you are at their mercy. In our last dismal experience the driver left the "drunk spider" note but lacked a phone number. Calling Hermes they said they could do nothing as the parcel was no longer with them or their tracking system. There was no way to contact the driver at all and arrange redelivery. We don't know if a redelivery was attempted or not. All we know is a week later the goods were returned to the vendor and we got a refund.

 

We had a Royal Mail postie for a while who had a habit of leaving any parcels at the depot and prefilling the dreaded card. I caught him a couple of times slipping the card through the letter box and he had to admit the parcel wasn't with him. 2 written complaints later, new postie, and it hasn't happened since. Then again I got the impression from the manager at the depot the postie in question was a temp and already on probation for other issues.

[NGT6 1315]

I can't tell how it is in the UK, but many German courier services – mainly DPD, GLS and Hermes – do outsource parcel handling to subcontractors, some of whom then subcontract their services yet again. That, of course, means many delivery people are paid rather poorly and/or in dodgy self-employment arrangements – dodgy meaning, they are, for example, not technically independent, which is at best questionable under German law (as experience has shown such arrangements are too often used by shady employers to avoid social security and health insurance payments).

 

While that is not really an excuse for poor handling of shipments resulting in damage or total losses, I suppose it might explain why quite a number of delivery staff seem to have adopted a "bite me" attitude.