[Closed] How do parcels go missing?

I've often thought this too, and the fact when I post something I need to buy insurance. Like actually paying for something to be posted isn't a guarantee that it will get there.

I am awaiting something that has been posted from Singapore, everything was going swimmingly until it reached the UK and now its gone missing.

Shirely the oldest postal service in the world would have this down by now?

Could the postie, who sometimes leaves packages in the open, and forgets to card, have been clocked by a ne'er do well who went and grabbed it?

I have been wondering this too.

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Our day to day postman is a very nice chap.

However when he is on holiday we get the cretins who just think it is okay to leave the post in our unlocked porch. I wouldn't mind but the porch is only 2ft deep and they can't be bothered to put a letter through the letter box!

Rant over.

I was out jogging yesterday and ran past a courier lorry with its load doors fully open and the driver just disappearing from view. It would have been easy to take something.

It can just get nicked obviously, either by staff or because of the in-attention of staff. It might not have been packaged or labelled correctly by the sender, or gotten minced/mushed/mashed in such a way that it either can't be identified where its going, or so that you would't want it if it did.

It might not have physically disappeared, but if its been misdirected at some point so that the tracking data can't find it then theres not an economically viable way for someone to then go physically looking for it - the missing package could be a few feet from where its supposed to be or in another county. So its more a case of cutting losses and declaring it as lost than it actually being no longer in their possession . Once they've compensated the sender then the item is theirs anyway so they can recoup some those compensation costs by selling lost goods on

Sorry you were out. Parcel left.... in wheelie bin.
(only a 20% chance of it being bin collection day)

Even when you pay for insurance and tracking it's no guarantee.
Stuff goes missing, fact of life.

Stuff can fall off conveyor belts, out of parcel trollies, packaging get snagged on machinery and contents fall out.....need i say more.

I never use RM unless I can't avoid it.
With services like collectplus which is cheaper, better tracking, and better/quicker claim procedures when stuff does go wrong, i'm surprise RM still has a parcel business.

International postage is a complete other ball game.

Scar
P.s. I've had stuff not delivered as they said I was out, then it got sent to the RM lost/found depot in Ireland (all because the sender never put a return address!). Thats where they take lost/found and open it all and flog it to recoup insurance claim losses.
P.p.s Even RM tracked signed for can be signed for by anyone, including the postman himself!

I order loads online and yet to have a single item go missing.....

That's because.....

[img] [/img]

...and don't act like you don't know this.

For the record, this is the 2nd, if it is missing, in about 10yrs or more.

I spent an enlightening Christmas working at a large RM sorting office.

The previous year a driver had un hitched his articulated trailer and left it in part of the depot where empty trailers were parked up. Others got parked around it.

3 months later they got round to using that trailer and found that it was FULL of Christmas cards and parcels.

Which concerns me as Parcelforce tracking says my new bike was loaded into a lorry at the same depot at 8.06 yesterday morning and it has still not travelled tbe 15 miles to my house.

Last parcel that was declared as a genuine "we can't find it", was RM+DHL/Deutschepost. Postie left the card, went to collect it from post office and it was lost. Turned up back at sender, since they obviously put it straight back on the send it back pallet, rather than keep it for 6 working days, then send back.

The one before that was a secure letter sent, and dropped at local parcel store (actually in my nearest LBS). They lost it. Did all the paperwork to initiate formal search. Then the owner came running up the street as I was walking back to the tram stop, saying they found it down behind the back of the bench/shelves they now use for parcels instead of bike bits.

Jamie, a RM staff member is now parading around the sorting office wearing your new shoes.

And nothing else

And nothing else

We didn't need to know that!

i ordered something before - it never arrived; chased the retailer and they sent another - got the red card from RM, when i collected it they gave me two parcels. guess what was in the first.

Also i have seen at a local courier company laptop boxes and other shiny boxes flung over the fence (backs onto a river). Maybe they just flung the boxes out - or maybe it's for collection later.

Jamie, a RM staff member is now parading around the sorting office wearing your new shoes.

And nothing else

Not sure I want them now 😥

Don't they get deemed dangerous and [s]safely disposed of[/s] sold at auction/on ebay?

Jamies said 'two pairs' so where are the other ones er hanging around 🙂

Don't they get deemed dangerous and [s]safely disposed[/s] of sold at auction/on ebay?

Only if they are Nike Airs.

I once ordered a part which was sent by interlink. I recieved an empty packet with nowt in it. I queried this with the shop and they accused me of lying. The shop said I had signed for it. I asked for a copy of the signature and lo and behold there is was - someone had scrawled my name. Now I told the shop that it wasn't my signature and I told them that there parcel company had stolen the goods and forged my signature but how could I prove it? I also complained to the parcel company that their delivery driver had forged my signature but they could'nt have cared less.
In the end the shop DID send me another part, but I got the impression they fully thought I had kept the original.

I expect it's fairly easy to succumb to human error. A package gets placed on shelf 32 rather than 22, then someone else goes to get it from shelf 22 and goes "oh, it's not here."

Harder to see how things would go missing permanently though, beyond mislabelling / damage / theft. I'd expect - nay, hope - that even very late deliveries like the lorry above ^^ would get processed once they were discovered.

Not sure I want them now

Hopefully he's wearing them on his feet.

My duplicate driving license went missing a few weeks ago, meaning I missed the deadline to submit it for a fixed penalty speeding fine. The police didn't want to hear any excuses, so I'm in bloody court on Tuesday instead. 😈

Bloody postie had delivered to a house a few doors down, who were on holiday. I might send them whatever whopping fine I get!

I once had a parcel from CRC go missing. They sent out a replacement. The original package arrived 12 months later, almost to the day 😯 They've clearly got time portals in the sorting offices

I once lost a massive hardwood front door for a fortnight with much frustrating calls to courier and shop. Only found it because same courier did a ninja card drop for another delivery even though i was in. Chased him up the street and then got to back of the open van and said 'where's my parc... Hang on that's my door!'

Looking at state of it It had just sat in bottom of the van all that time as no driver could be bothered to lift it out.

Now I told the shop that it wasn't my signature and I told them that there parcel company had stolen the goods and forged my signature but how could I prove it? I also complained to the parcel company that their delivery driver had forged my signature but they could'nt have cared less.

Could also have been a misdelivery of course; postie goes to the wrong door number or Foo Street instead of Foo Road, neighbour thinks "oh, free stuff" and scribbles the name they've just read off the label.

I once had the opposite problem at my local branch post office. Had a knock-a-door-run 'while you were out' card so went to collect the parcel. The package had been sent to my OH by a friend of hers, but said friend had asked her wife to post it. The wife didn't know my OH personally and wrote her name down incorrectly. Took me three trips to the branch before they reluctantly released it to me.

binners beat me to the Postman Plod reference...

but sometimes stuff get delivered to the wrong address and the recepients just keep it. i had an issue with a TV, ordered it, didnt come, phoned them, they sent a new one which i recieved - then about a week later a neighbour knocked on and said he'd got this big parcel at his waiting for me to collect. if he'd have said nowt id have been none the wiser, or worse off.

another time i was checking my outgoings like you do and realised i was still paying a monthly subscription to a wine club and that about 6 half dozen cases had been delivered to my old address. they questioned the new people who admitted that they'd been supping for free for a year.

I once lost a massive hardwood front door for a fortnight

Sounds like the sort of behaviour I've come to know and love from Yodel.

I ordered a new rim for a my back wheel a couple of years ago, it never arrived

I contacted the shop and they gave me the royal mail tracking info

They sent out another, through royal mail, again didn't arrive, got refunded as those were the last 2 they had

I ordered another rim from a different shop after being refunded, surprise surprise, it never arrived

Obviously half inched somewhere within the postal system

Parcelforce are apparently in the habit of leaving signed-for packages from our street at the offices of the Estate Agent on the corner.

It is difficult to see why a package addressed to "BigDummy, 5 Shady Avenue" should be regarded as properly delivered if it is signed for by Sharon from Edwards Estate Agents on North Street, but there we are.

🙂

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

Kent has 2 places called Minster.
Both of them have an Augustine Road.
My grandmother was always getting mail for the other house with the same address, and vice versa.

And when I lived in Stoke Gifford (part of Bristol, that got lopped off to form South Gloucestershire), the RM even told us at the time that addressing as Stoke Gifford, Bristol rather than Stoke Gifford, S.Glos, may improve delivery times. The postcode changed from BS12 to BS34.

I don't normally contribute, but being reminded of Yodel compelled me to write something. Yodel's orange "you were out" cards say that their sorting warehouse is open on Saturdays. Train tickets for two to Leeds, then a taxi journey to the out of town industrial estate to be told that parcel collection isn't available on Saturdays is not a fun day out.

I know a bloke who received his own and another person's order from an online retailer, all in the one box. The other person's delivery note and address label were also in there, so clearly a mix-up in the packing dept. The guy decided to inform neither the retailer nor the other customer, figuring the order was probably untraceable. He did very, very well out of that mix up, and I doubt the loss of my friendship due to his dishonesty has caused him any distress.

Experiences I've had sending things:

- Parcels get nicked - out of the back of the delivery van, or once when the depot got crowded and they put a bunch of stuff outside to make space.

- Parcels get misdelivered - either to a neighbour who steals it, or if a card isn't left then the recipient doesn't know who has it, or on a couple of occasions it's been "left in a safe place" which turns out to be a neighbour's greenhouse or the wheelie bin on collection day.

- Parcels get forgotten, they fall down the back of racking in the warehouse or go under the driver's seat or something.

our post office is open saturdays.
they say 6 working days before stuff gets sent back.
parcels can only be collected after 13:00 the following day.
our postoffice shuts at 12:00 (or might be 13:00) on saturdays.
they count that day as one of the 6 working days, when a parcel delivery is attempted on a friday, so when you're going on vacation for a week and arrive at 11:45 on a saturday, in germany, hoping that they might bend their "after 13:00" rule, you're going to be disappointed.

they don't deliver saturdays, but only classify it as a working day for the purposes of collection.

I know for a fact that the parcel would be sitting on the shelf. any other day of the week, they're not going to magically stock the awaiting collection shelves at 12:59:59.

so bike24 got the whole lot back

[i]Now I told the shop that it wasn't my signature and I told them that there parcel company had stolen the goods and forged my signature but how could I prove it? I also complained to the parcel company that their delivery driver had forged my signature but they could'nt have cared less.

Could also have been a misdelivery of course; postie goes to the wrong door number or Foo Street instead of Foo Road, neighbour thinks "oh, free stuff" and scribbles the name they've just read off the label.
[/i]
Would be possible where it not for the empty packet that was delivered to me.

I had Yodel "deliver" a parcel to me and leave it is a "safe place". Said safe place was the 3/4 full wheely bin at the top of my drive. It was bin day. I'm sure you can guess the rest.

A replacement package was sent and and was put in exactly the same place (admittedly, the bin was by the side of the house this time), thankfully not a bin day this time. Absolute idiots.

The one time I've had a parcel go missing (other than the useless company who took a month to admit they hadn't posted it before refunding it) was in the run up to christmas. It had been left in the garden with no note as to where it was. At that time of year I am never in the house during daylight hours during the week, and I suspect I'd been away at the weekend so wasn't around during daylight then either. So I simply didn't see the parcel for a couple of weeks until after a replacement had been delivered 😳

As part of my job I tracked delivery rates for our accounts with most of the major couriers over several years and many thousands of deliveries. The only courier who have managed to have a better successful delivery rate than Royal Mail are DPD. Royal Mail do a pretty amazing job really.

Yodel, obviously, are the worst I've tracked.

Imagine the excuses you'll get once Googles flying drones start delivering...

My answer to the question posed by the OP is in two parts:

1.) Read Shaun Ryders biogrtaphy "Twisting my Melon" - he was a postie in Manchester and spills the beans fairly comprehensively on that game.

2.) Further to point 1, see also the unions who clearly have the upper hand still at RM. CWU & Unite/CMA are doing a jolly good job (for their members).

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.

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?

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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.

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.....

[img] [/img]

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...

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.