Without doubt, round here its Parcelforce. DPD, Evri, APC all deliver without fail but Parcelforce can never get anything correct.
Currently I'm still waiting for a package that was sent last Friday on a 24 hour service and a difference parcel that they have had in their depot since 20 September but seem unable to deliver and wont let me go and collect it.
Our Parcelforce guy is brilliant.
Amazon have stopped knocking on the door and just leave stuff at the door.
Evri seem to take ages processing stuff at their hubs.
Evri, by a country mile.
We live in the city centre, but down a hidden lane that's quite narrow at the top and half the time they can't be bothered to come down it so they just take a photo with no obvious context to say they've delivered it, then it appears a few days later. Either that or they just loose stuff. Last item being my daughter's New Balance trainers for school which failed to ever turn up. We had to get a replacement pair sent from Schuh, who then used Royal Mail.
You could say they're Evri bit as shit as they were when they were Hermes.
I'll get my coat.
No doubt it’s all about your local delivery driver. We had an amazing DPD one a few years back, now we have an old lady for Evri who goes well above and beyond.
Amazon have a proud history of just leaving things on the doorstep, in full view of passing traffic including the hundreds on the school run twice a day (we're right by the lollipop lady). Pretty sure we had our first doorstep theft on Monday - can't say "not delivered" on the feedback form, only "not where they said it is", to which they say "thanks for the feedback" and there's nothing further they can do, so I now have to hassle the company we bought from for a POD. I even spoke to the driver last month - I was in, they didn't ring the doorbell, just left the parcel on the step - he just said sorry. I'm not so bothered about sorry - I want a "next time we'll ring the doorbell or leave it in a safe place"! Git.
We don't have any duff ones round here, all really good, stuff turns up when it should regardless of who brings it.
Depends how you quantify "worst."
Amazon tend to get parcel on the delivery van promptly, but they lightly tap on the door and dash to the next stop, after plonking your parcel on the doorstep for all to see.
I got very annoyed with Yodel a few years back: https://www.pickled-hedgehog.com/what-we-have-here-is-a-failure-to-communicate/ (note there is A LOT of swearing in that post)
We do live in a place that's not always easy to find an DHL in particular do seem to consider our neighbours as "close enough"
The rest tho, pretty good. APC are brilliant, turn up as per the time on the App and don't seem desperate to punt breakable items from the road to the house. Parcelforce are actually okay although the long term driver must blame me for his back issues due to the number of large boxes of frames/parts I've ordered. Evri great, we know the driver she texts us when she's 5 mins away.
I'm currently very annoyed with DHL for their non delivery of a phone. But that's less about their drivers and more about their apparently toxic relationship with Apple 😉
Evri and Yodel - can't remember which one my last delivery was, but they gave me the option of where I wanted it left so I ticked the box and added clear notes for the driver. Got home and the parcel was just sat at the front door, no attempt made to even slightly place it out of sight of passers by. I left feedback but expect nothing will happen.
The other one of those two has the ability to put the package on the doorstep, ring the bell and then just disappear so even if you zoom to the door immediately there's no sign of who delivered it, or their vehicle.
DPD are best by a mile
I'd say Evri just for the erratic quality - we have a good driver for a while then he gets put on a different round and we have a terrible one. I quite often get parcels delivered to a house with the same name, 6 miles away.
Royal mail and parcel force are excellent for me - but that's prob because I run a post office ?
Evri, the one that used to be Herpes. Changing their name didn't cure anything.
evri is good for me, within 1/2 hour of the main hub (leeds) and my local delivery lady is excellent. and i get vinted stuff to my local shop £2.29 delivered
parcelforce arent great nearest hub is rotherham for west yorkshire which is silly.
UPS.
I live about 20 minutes drive from their distribution centre but somehow, whenever anything comes via them on 24hr delivery they always schedule it for after 18:00 then decide they can't deliver because the driver is out of time.
The item will eventually turn up if I'm lucky, between 2 and 3 days later, after I've had yet another rant on the 'customer service' (I use this term very loosely) system.
All the usual suspects are very good around here, with my Evri driver being extremely helpful in stashing deliveries safely when we're not about.
Evri for me by a country mile. No one else gets close. I avoid any retailer who uses them but if it happens by accident my heart sinks.
In my area they hand over to a 'last mile' subcontractor called Capital Carriers. It's a minimum of 10 working days for anything from despatch to delivery. It can be 5 or 6 weeks, often longer. Invariably you need to hassle the retailer to hassle Evri to hassle Capital to get anything to move. Occasionally a disgruntled worker who has just walked out of their job from the Inverness depot will post a photo to the local community Facebook group of the warehouse in Inverness with thousands of parcels backing up with no staff left to do the work. My last delivery from them took a couple of months to arrive and when I challenged the driver he said he'd been off work ill for 6 weeks and when he's away no one does his round.
They're all much of a muchness delivery-wise., so I rate them on the quality and frequency of close passes on me, plus a scoring based on general witnessed standard of driving/parking.
DHL is the outright worst currently, followed by DPD Local (the blue logo one), APC Overnight, Yodel, Evri, DPD (red), then UPS.
Evri - but anything that goes large parcel - local driver was great (once she got it) but it was always the chaos at the depot. We've had a few deliveries of 'cat food' boxes that said out for delivery, then Evri decided it needed to go in the van, so this added a few days delay for no reason.
Royal Mail. Sometimes things are over a week late. Sometimes they don't even turn up. Then there's the "fee to pay" cards and the time I requested a pickup, label to be supplied and he came without a label and had absolutely no clue what to do. RM are shit.
All the other delivery companies are spot on.
Yodel and Amazon can be crap, but it depends on the delevery person. We've had excellent service from some Amazon drivers but others have been ****ing awful, just stuffing parcels by the bins.
Our Evri guy is great, and my mate is a manager at the Paercel Force depot so their drivers are always good if I tell him theres something sigificant coming.
Our postie is amazing as well. He's seen my dog grow from being 8 weeks old so always plays with her when he comes in. She lloves him and goes mental to get to him if we see him on the street!
Royal Fail for me too; I currently have a package lost in the system. They seem to be the only company I have issues with.
I've no complaints about the folk that actually deliver to the house, but the system seems rather ropey.
At the old house it was Yodel by a very long way, I had to explain to their customer "services" many times over that "left in a secure location" and "dumped in plain view of the street somewhere in the same postcode" were not synonymous. They'd usually reply that they'd sacked the driver, then the same thing would happen again on the next delivery so either they had a spate of crap drivers or they were lying to me.
Here it's hard to say. Most deliveries come in a Prime liveried van, whether that's subcontracted out I don't know. My biggest bugbear is people pounding on the bloody door. I have a Ring doorbell, it is large, illuminated and goes DING DONG in a big loud voice, it's hard to miss when walking past let alone for a delivery driver who's actual job is to ring doorbells. But no, they either ignore it completely or press it and immediately follow up with bangbangbangbang. It drives me potty.
And I just tempted fate. Prime delivery, box dumped on the doorstep, bell rang and the driver immediately ran off. FFS.
Plus - Royal Mail are the only company who deliver unwanted crap through the letterbox as part of their "service". Pizza delivery, Farmfoods leaflets and the like. Spamming gits
It's definitely area specific! We've had the same Evri guy for years and years, everyone locally knows him, and he's pretty much infallible and very nice too. And our postman literally lives next door so Royal Mail are great for us. But the rest of them, it's so random...
Amazon. Our drive is about 10 meters long and the driver often leaves parcels at the road end of the drive rather than on the doorstep or in the letterbox. Saves him 10 steps but gives me a load of grief when the parcel disappears or gets soaked in the rain.
Evri for me are absolutly shocking. Delivery notification feels like 10 minutes before they decide to leave at at the front door (my house is directly on a road and no garden)
You cant ammend a delivery or ever ever speak to a human.
Like above I avoid any seller who uses them.
funny isnt it (possibly not) all the delivery people where we live are excellent. We have a lot of deliveries, of all sorts of stuff. Never have an issue.
DPD around here, at best they just leave the box on the step without even ringing the bell, sometimes they put the delivery in front of the wrong house, and often just take it to the depot/packet shop without even attempting to deliver.
North Herts, all pretty good. I always request DPD, however, for their minute by minute tracking.
Royal Mail have been awful near me for the last year or so. Only seem to deliver a couple of times a week (I’m in a city).
Local Evri driver is great, but service level drops off when he’s on holiday or day off.
I think the main issue is all the delivery drivers are rushed to get the deliveries completed in their shift. There is a local postman here who runs out the van to all his deliveries. I reckon the software then updates the delivery round time to match his speed. So the next guy comes along and has to rush like mad to finish his deliveries on time. Same with Amazon. If you have a regular delivery guy he will know the route and any issues and want to keep the customers sweet. If it’s a different guy every week any new guy will be on a learning curve and stressed out to complete his round. They then take shortcuts like ringing the bell quickly and doorstepping you.
I know Amazon load up their subcontracted delivery guys to the max. Speaking to one driver he was getting upset that people took a few minutes to open the door. One woman he spotted through her front window getting up to answer the door. She then sat down again to watch an interesting bit on tv for a minute. She then got up again and came to the door. He was going ****. Said he had on average 220 items to deliver in a 10 hour shift. It took him about an hour to load up at the depot so he had 9 hours to drive and deliver the items. So he had around 3 minutes per item including driving etc.
DPD around here, at best they just leave the box on the step without even ringing the bell, sometimes they put the delivery in front of the wrong house, and often just take it to the depot/packet shop without even attempting to deliver.
It's perhaps worth noting that DPD (red logo) and DPD Local (blue logo) are not the same thing. DPD is the gold standard courier (IMHO), DPD Local used to be Interlink Express, a courier so monumentally rubbish that even Time Computers eventually sacked them off.
I think the main issue is all the delivery drivers are rushed to get the deliveries completed in their shift.
I totally get that, and I do sympathise, right up to the point where I have to pay for their shortcuts. For our two missing deliveries from Monday, Mrs Pondo has had a straight refund, my retailer says there's no POD, which is a breach of Amazon's own terms, but they can't claim because Amazon said it was delivered. So either me or the retailer is out of pocket - it's absolutely criminal.
Yodel and DHL occupy joint 5hitest position here. Our house has a name, we have no street name but the postcode is bang in the centre of my garage. Should be easy to find you’d think. But somehow DHL manage to regularly deliver our stuff to an identically named house 3 miles away. Essentially their routing software doesn’t take account of the actual full address, which is pretty spectacularly crap.
Yodel are just masters of failing to deliver when they say they will, or as often happens, not at all.
At the moment, it's DHL, I ordered a lot of bits from Tredz (who have been superb in this debacle), DHL said they'd deliver between 10-11am. I drop the kids off at school and whilst I'm out I get an email saying parcel delivered at 8:30. Apparently sign for by me.
Get home at 9ish and the parcel is gone.
Other than that, all the other delivery guys are great, Evri guy is a diamond. DPD is ridiculously helpful and the last few Amazon deliveries have been so good I've bothered to leave him feedback.
Evri.
Everyone else manages to deliver stuff to us.
Although DPD can NEVER be bothered to actually bring the parcel to the door (weirdly, the exception being if the package is heavy or big?!) and often walk further to put it down the side of the house. Odd behaviour.
As others have stated, a lot is down the the driver but Evri compound their utterly useless driver rating by being impossible to get any help out of when I need to chase up a "next day" delivery after 7 days!
As above, I now dont buy from companies that I know use them.
Our Evri guy is amazing. Such a nice guy
UPS, the depot is in Bury St Edmunds, home deliveries for me should be mid-morning to early afternoon. They are unable to get packages to us on the specified day, they are always a day late with notification that they will be late by email after business hours. This week a whole day was wasted waiting in for them, the dog was not impressed with his very delayed walk.
Theres nothing between their delivery skilly, but DPD are outstanding in terms of the shitness of their driving.
Pretty sure they only employ drivers who hate cyclists.
that or they have employee monitoring akin to the bus from Speed, where they cant slow down or give way or their van explodes.
Currently Parcelforce.
Tuesday; "Insufficient address return to depot
Wednesday; "cannot locate address" return to depot
Thursday; "Delivery refused by addressee".
At no point has a big red van been anywhere near, and it's not the first time from PF. I updated my location on their app, provided a neighbour, a safe place and a local post office via the app.
Tweeks (who I bought from) have told me they prohibit safe place etc in their PF contract, can't advise what happens next, and won't refund me until PF return the parcel to them.
In other news another company has now revealed that the item I bought (showing in stock 1-2 days delivery), a week after ordering hasn't left Helly Hansen in Amsterdam yet and they expect 8 days to get it to me (but there may be delays "due to Brexit"). If I want to cancel there will be a 'recall charge' - even though they admit it's not gone anywhere yet.
FFS
I'm not having a good week on the new toy front - and it's only a bike seat and a fleece jacket not a Ferrari I'm buying...
I'm very impressed with Royal Mail - no one was in yesterday when they tried to deliver the new lighting set for my towbar rack. Presumably the same again today, but they used their initiative, got in the side gate and put it in the shed that wasn't locked.
Last week an Amazon guy used his initiative and rather than leaving a package on the doorstep in the pissing rain, he found the front door was unlocked and I got downstairs to see his hand disappearing back outside after he threw the package in.
We live in a village where these things are not massive risks BTW.
I was shocked yesterday morning, knock on the door at 0830 and the Amazon delivery chap was still there holding my parcel, when I opened the door ~30secs later! 😮
I think it will forever be Royal Mail for me, for the times they quietly slipped “sorry we missed you” slips through the letterbox having left the parcel at the depot. The postman wasn’t too happy about being caught pulling that trick when I eventually caught him at the door about to do it.
Currently Parcelforce.
Tuesday; “Insufficient address return to depot
Wednesday; “cannot locate address” return to depot
Thursday; “Delivery refused by addressee”.
At no point has a big red van been anywhere near, and it’s not the first time from PF. I updated my location on their app, provided a neighbour, a safe place and a local post office via the app.
Much against my better judgement I phoned ParcelFarce - after a 5 minute recorded loop and key pressing which often failed to correctly record my verbal responses finally spoke to someone (who often failed to record my responses correctly and me his) who told me the driver had been no closer that 7.8 miles away from address but somehow, I had refused delivery. The drivers do not have phones (so why ask for a number?). Parcel will be returned to depot awaiting sender instructions. He refused to accept I had not refused delivery. I was tempted to demonstrate how loud I could shout, and ask if that would be heard 8 miles away...
Tweeks have gone quiet on it - but given their contract prohibits safe place, specified alternative address or post office as options I'm amazed they manage to get anything delivered. ParcelFarce are actively not bothering to even try, but Tweeks are complicit.
Not even a high value item FFS! I've had less trouble getting whole bikes delivered.
Mumble grumble rant rant...
If I want to cancel there will be a ‘recall charge’ – even though they admit it’s not gone anywhere yet.
Well, that's illegal.
RM currently working quite hard to piss me off after I asked them to redeliver to one post office, and they've delivered to a different one.