I’ve always been very impressed with DPD more than any other carrier and got chatting to the driver last night when he delivered an item.

It turned out that he’d been waiting around the corner for four minutes because their hand scanners won’t allow them to scan in the item for delivery and take a signature from the recipient until a predetermined time slot has been reached; his next delivery to a nearby farm wasn’t for another several minutes and he’d have to wait again until he could make that delivery.

A trivial and dull fact but it surprised me nonetheless.

My local DPD driver is Adrian, i can stalk him on the internerd.

My local DPD driver is Adrian, i can stalk him on the internerd.

Likewise; I greeted him at his van and said ‘Hi Ralph’..!

I guess that is linked to them giving specific time slots – they can’t turn up before the time slot, after all.

They have also been excellent delivering stuff to me in the UK.

If I’m having something delivered by Amazon via DPD (which doesn’t seem to happen so much anymore), I’ll get texted a delivery slot with an option to change it, etc. However, when I ordered a wifi thing from Three on Thursday, the chap mentioned as he hung up that it would be delivered by DPD. “Great”, I thought, then realised he didn’t have my mobile number, email address etc. As it happened, they missed me yesterday and left one of their cards; to have it delivered in a 3-4 hour time slot on Monday would cost me £10…which feels a bit steep. Thankfully, their depot is a couple of minutes from me so I can pick up there. It appears that the level of service you get as the receiver depends on how much your retailer is paying them. Which is fair enough IMO. They’re still one of the better couriers out there.

Amazon’s own logistics guys always knock around till they find a neighbour…all of us around here have a friendly agreement between us that we’ll take stuff for each other, especially if we see a courier outside struggling to find somewhere to leave it.

Yeah, I know a few people who work at DPD HQ and they’re very serious with their drivers. Even delivering early gets them in to trouble!

Sounds all good as it probably stops them driving stupidly to get to the next drop, plus it stops them giving allocated times then the driver going early and no-one is there.

I’ve had this happen too, I told the driver that he should have just knocked on the door but as above, he said there would be trouble at t’mill if he did that.

Odd.

I prefer the Occado system where they phone you and say “I’m running a bit early, is it convenient to deliver now?”

We had a dpd driver really roughly handling boxes of china which surprisingly broke.
He unloaded next to his van and drove off. Didn’t even deliver to the shop just left it next to the loading bay.
This was a couple of years ago,so I guess they have changed.

Nights must be pretty quiet in the HH household… 🙂

Another +1 for the distribution centre & hq staff. It’s easy to just blame the drivers, but the folk that resolve my queries come back with the most random conclusions.

“It was scanned in at Birmingham AND Coventry then delivered to Aberdeen after being held in Northampton?”
“Yeah, the floor staff weren’t sure whether it was supposed to be an empty box with just an invoice”.

Their ability and willingness to direct dial depot managers is beyond brilliant. Especially on Fridays.