I had Yodel “deliver” a parcel to me and leave it is a “safe place”.

I’ve had a long-running war with Yodel over this. They have now finally managed to train their chimp that “abandoned on the path outside my house in driving rain and in full view of the street” does not constitute a safe place, but it’s taken months.

DPD are the gold standard as far as couriers are concerned, IME.

DPD are the gold standard as far as couriers are concerned, IME.

Indeed. I have actively used companies because I know they use them. Tracking side of things is streets ahead of other couriers.

Yodel delivered 3 parcels to work and marled them as my 3 parcels but only 2 were addressed to me and no-one knows where my missing parcel has gone!

Slight deviation, what happens to first and second class mail?
They get put into the same postbox, taken out by the same postman and put into the same sack. The sack containing both kinds is put into a van and driving to a sorting office. They emerge from the sorting office in the same sack, get put into a van and driven to the same house where the are removed from the same sack by the same postman and put through the same letter box.
Magically second class takes a day longer to do this than first, do RM employ someone who’s job it is to pull out all the second class post and put it to one side for a day before putting back into the system?

I used to work in postal engineering. We once opened up a letter segregator to inspect some belts at the rear, found about 15 letters that had been in there for many many years.

2nd class mail is segregated at primary sort and processed after first class.

Magically second class takes a day longer to do this than first

Far as I’m aware, it largely doesn’t these days. I’d guess that if there was a delivery issue – eg, more post than vans – then 2nd would get bumped in favour of first. But there’s no practical difference between the two as far as I can work out, beyond the price and that it’s psychologically “better”.

Should use GPS logging not just signing. I had a signed for bike left in the garage – online signature was delivery boy’s.

Or digital signature.
Or even just fingerprint (or hash of fingerprint details).

andytherocketeer – Member
mis-delivery to wrong town happens too. makes me wonder what they even do with the postcode.

I regularly get mail at work clearly addressed to other places, which gets sent back to RM, who’s main sorting office is a short distance up the road from us, on the same industrial estate. Some of that mail has the same postcode as us, particularly one company who are the opposite side of the road. Fine, easy mistake to make.
But you have to wonder how those letters, clearly and unambiguously addressed to different companies and people, continue to be delivered to us, over and over again.
I’ve had the same bunch of eight or nine letters arrive in my hands, posted on 14.8.2014, for the last two weeks, in fact several arrived again, today!
How incompetent do you have to be to see an address a hundred yards down the road from your workplace, outside of which you probably park your car, (many of the cars parked opposite belong to posties), and think it’s fine to put it into the mail trays for a different business on the opposite side of the road?

Well myhermes lost a bike frame 2 miles from my house. By lost I mean pinched by one of there staff. As I refuse to accept you can lose a bike box

a bit of light on the subject from a royal mail “insider”… all of items that are collected from businesses, post offices and post boxes are all gathered in one place, regional sorting offices. for example Swindon Mail Center or Chelmsford SEMAC, these places are ‘kin HUGE! the majority of the mail/parcels are then mechanically sorted by massively expensive (but not very good) machines (this is where first and second class items are separated). these generate millions of miss sorts a day which then have to be sorted by hand, by real people. add to this the problems of incorrectly addressed items, those with the wrong postcode, labels/mail/parcels getting destroyed by the weather/machinery/idiotic postal workers and items will go missing. we as a company (royal mail) lose around 1 million items a year which when you consider we handle, if memory serves, 15 million items (on average) a day isn’t too bad, unless it happens to be yours! your postman will handle up to around 15000 items of mail before even getting out on delivery. human error is , pardon the pun, part and parcel of the job. people get things wrong, stuff goes missing and even stolen by unscrupulous shits that give the rest of us a bad name. dont get me wrong i am in no way defending this. i hate the fact that stuff goes missing, including some of my own items. i feel it reflects badly on those of us who are striving to do a good job. but it happens. remember the onus is on the sender to recover costs and replace goods.

My sister used to own a parcel courier business. One day we had a set of gates come through from the main depot address was a Muirthwaite, Ayshire – no return address and no marks on the gates from which their manufacturer could be identified. Now these were 15ft wide oak gates with silver fancy bits on them. They must have cost an absolute fortune. They stayed in the depot for 18 months and nobody tried to claim them. My sister eventually sold them and gave the money to charity. So aye – things go missing all the time because things are poorly labelled or labels come off.

Checked your gutter yet?

I do hope you get royalties every time you post that pic, cloudnine 8)

Was about to say my last posting of it

Where we live now (rural) we have no problems whatsoever with any of the various postal/courier companies we use.

Where we use to live before (urban) we had no problems whatsoever with any of the various postal/courier companies we use.

Not sure what you lot do, or where you live that all the failed postal/courier deliver, or not, at your places.

You only have to look at some of the people who work in the sorting offices to see why stuff goes missing, I often work near Mount Pleasant sorting office and a lot of the staff are alcoholics and a lot of them smoke dope in parked cars before they go on shift (used to see them when I worked late), gradually the ‘postie pubs’ round here have turned into gastro pubs, I was in one last night and stood next to a postie at the bar as he necked a pint of lager and had a fiver at the ready for the next one, he was in the pub for 15 min.
Saying that my uncle is a rural postman and he’s the salt of the earth, he wasn’t surprised to hear about the sorting office staff in London though.

Not lost but it was hilarious

Working for a testing lab (materials, soils etc) my mate took delivery of the antique marble fire place he won on ebay.

” delivery for mr. Xxxxx” said the courier
” ooh, goody, what is it?” Asked Mr. xxxx
” dunno mate, rock samples?” Replied the courier

Oh how we laughed at the smashed up antique marble fire place rock sample.

Waiting in all day for a parcel only to met by the postie in my driveway with a look of shame on his face with his I missed you card pre written out. His excuse for not having my parcel was I am normally at work so I don’t bother taking your parcels.

[video]http://youtu.be/jF_w7uSnOj0[/video]

Waiting in all day for a parcel only to met by the postie in my driveway with a look of shame on his face with his I missed you card pre written out. His excuse for not having my parcel was I am normally at work so I don’t bother taking your parcels.

I’ve caught my Postie posting the card through the letter box, twice. This doesn’t include the occasions when we received the ‘sorry you was out’ card, even though we was in. Just the sod never rang the door bell.

I sold one of these via eBay…..

The buyer received it no problem a few days later.

Just the one issue. The entire leg assembly was missing… 🙄

Waiting in all day for a parcel only to met by the postie in my driveway with a look of shame on his face with his I missed you card pre written out. His excuse for not having my parcel was I am normally at work so I don’t bother taking your parcels.

If the last 99 times the guy has humped a parcel to your house, and no-one has been in, I kind of see his logic.

I’m going to judge this one…

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J538b-OLRU[/video]

Our regular postie is fantastic, knows us and takes care of the post. On one occasion we couldn’t wait in for a signed for package, driving down or road we saw him, thought I would do and ask if we could get it there and then, by the time I had stopped he had already got the parcel and signing machine out and ready without me beginning to ask! He is not perfect but on a couple of occasions he has used a “you weren’t in” note to apologise for potting our post through the wrong door. Must be ready to do but I don’t mind if he actually knows what he has done and tells us. And he always wears shorts like a proper postie, and a Tilly like mine… He’s great 🙂

I had ordered a swing out table leg thingy last week for the campervan. Didn’t buy a table top at the same time as the place was too expensive. When it arrived there were 2 boxes. (Left on front porch by the dhl guy) one of which contained a table top.
It had my address & order ref on ot but a different name. I contacted the retailer and they said to just keep it, as it was too much hassle to arrange collection. They seemed surprised that I’d actually been honest. I just hope that the guy who had spent £60 on a table top eventually got one…

I have been blessed in the past with direct dials for warehouse distribution managers up and down the country.

**** doing their job every day. Working with them to resolve “I have a P.O.D but it’s not my customers” were brilliant days for me but these guys were literally firing people on the spot for not giving a shit.

Fedex, DPD, DHL, PF, Interlink, BPost, Royal Mail all suffer from devastating levels af staff disenchantment and piss poor accountability from the ground up.

Got a call back once to be informed that while delivering to a rural Scottish coastline, a contract driver had left a 2k coat “in your boat”.

Wasn’t the customers boat.

Lost coat. Courier company down a grand.

I worked via an agency for parcel force way back when

Minimum wage, long shifts, constant stream of parcels coming down conveyor off a lorry

They get chucked in big bins for each postcode, if a parcel misses a bn and goes down the back no ones got time to retrieve it as the conveyor doesn’t stop

Plenty of other innocent and not so innocent ways things dissapear, I’ve had a very battered CRC parcel turn up months later (after CRC had sent me anothet)

And we had a parcel tracked in London, Paris, Italy and finally Nottingham.

It was going to Leeds.

Ta TNT.

Yodel leaving parcels in bins? Round here they deliver by similar sounding street names, no need for post codes!

I was going to suggest that you support local businesses rather than ordering on line.

I was going to suggest that you support local businesses rather than ordering on line.

I was wondering when we would get to that.

we’re waiting for a telly

the delivery tracking page offers no detail but implies that I’m depending on one of

DPD, TNT, UKMail, UPS, DHL, ParcelForce

or CityLink

spare a prayer 😥

spare a prayer

I’ll pop one in the post to you now.

if local businesses sell what I want to buy, at a reasonable price (I don’t mind paying a bit more for service – see my post on that other thread on that topic!), then I’ll use them.
but if they don’t, then I buy online or not at all.

not all parcels sent (and lost) are online orders. my earlier post is an example of exactly that. was from a UK government department with documents too important to stick in the penny post.

All the major courier companies are pushing very hard for work, so there’s no slack time for chasing up mistakes as mentioned by folks above.

Eventually some of the courier firms will exit the market and costs will rise, and click and collect will become far more prevalent.

I have my fair share of gripes with RM but our local postie is fantastic. When we moved last year it really showed how good she was compared to the service we got in our new area. We have now moved back and she is on the list of good things about living where we do.

I was wondering when we would get to that.

I only threw it in to break up the mithering over people not being as awesome in life as the posters on the thread. All those ‘free delivery’ offers mean delivery is cheap. Cheap means low wages and slim margins and ultimately a less than 100% service.

Shipped a bike from France to the UK last year. La Poste managed to get “Royaume-Uni” (United Kingdom) and “Roumanie” (Romania) mixed-up.

Daftvader, the irritating thing with the misdelivered items we get is that the main Chippenham sorting office is less than a hundred yards along the road from us, they deliver anywhere from thirty to a hundred and forty trays of mail to us every day, and pick up truck loads of large cages full of trays or bags of mail, they must know who we are by now, and yet I get neatly sorted trays full of white DL envelopes, with bright pink C5 envelopes or similar, sometimes several, stuck right in the middle, clearly addressed to people in other parts of the town, district, county, country, or even continent.
And which keep being returned over and over again! I’ve had one large pink envelope, posted in Essex, delivered seven times over the course of fourteen days. It was addressed to someone in India… 🙄
Over the last fortnight I’ve had the same handful of letters, all intended for other businesses on our industrial estate, returned to us must be seven or eight times. This is either incompetence, or wilfully taking the piss.
And no, I can’t go and deliver them myself; I don’t have time, and it’s not my responsibility if contents go astray and I’m seen to be delivering it.

The only courier who have managed to have a better successful delivery rate than Royal Mail are DPD.

Really??
Depends what you’re sending/receiving apparently. I’ve had no less than 3 iPhones go missing with DPD. The last one went missing on the day the iPhone 5 was launched. I had two ordered…..one came from UPS 830am. The DPD one went missing. Local depot is 5mins away. Went there got told to go away. Eventually after many hours spent on phone with Vodafone over several days, I was told that DPD had lost over 500 iPhones just on launch day and that they regularly lose phones and have to compensate vodafone for it. Whilst the DPD tracking service, 2 delivery slot etc is excellent…that depends on it not being nicked somewhere in the system. I now will not have a phone delivered to my house, I always get it at the store.