It used to be Hermes that drilled fear into my soul when I saw the tracking email. Now it’s Fedex. Since the item shipped on Tuesday they’ve sent six different estimated delivery dates, culminating in a short notice “your item is on the van and will be delivered between 8am and next March”.

Just watched the van drive past the front door, pull to a stop, and the tracking pings again with “Business closed”. 40 minutes on the phone someone eventually says that it’s going to be taken to the local shipping centre and gives me the address.

So I called them to find out their opening hours, only to be told that they haven’t been a FedEx shipping centre for two years…

Tracking now shows “International shipment release”. Why can’t everyone use DPD? Or Royal Mail Special Delivery?

I sympathise – a buyer returned an item to me using Fedex recently. I watched it ping across Scotland before it arrived 3 days late on a 24hr service. Hermes has actually been OK for me recently.

I can remember in the early days anything sent to me by DPD was certain to be delayed or need my intervention to get if to my door.

But fair play to them, they’re probably the most reliable courier now. Deliveries are on time and can be accurately tracked so you don’t have to hang around for hours to be sure you’re there when they attempt delivery.

I’ve found the quality of service Hermes provides seems to vary hugely depending on where you are in the country, and how professional your local delivery person is.

I work for a Spanish company, up until recently all our shipments were sent from Spain via DPD in the UK. They were typically really good, and certainly the best we had used. That was until the start of this year; since then, every single shipment has been delayed. The customs clearance warehouse in Oldbury seems to be some sort of parcel black hole, once deliveries arrived there they would never leave… or at least, they would be returned back to Spain after nearly 2 months of sitting there.

We now use a mixture of Fedex (which seems to have been okay, if a bit slow at times) and Parcelforce.

Just before the pandemic, FedEx were delivering some external HDDs from our California office to the London office. They ended up being delivered a week late to the Agent Provocateur shop on the other side of London.

Tracking ping yesterday, “Your package will be delivered before midday today” (Thursday). Finally turned up today at the appointed hour.

The delivery was scheduled for Tuesday by Wahoo but sending the text on the wrong day looks a bit careless.

Hermes on the other hand said “waiting for package from supplier” on Wednesday and it was on the post shelf at home when I arrived yesterday. Perhaps the extra COVID work ahs helped them get their act together with all the practice.

DPD and hermes have been spot on throughout the pandemic.

FedEx managed to deliver a package for me yesterday, to the right number house…..in completely the wrong road and not notify me after having sent me 2 notifications that it was in transit.
Luckily the guy who came home and found a 6ft long cardboard tube containing the replacement lockset for my front door had the presence of mind to open the delivery note and call me to tell me where it was so I could pick it up. It took me 5 minutes to walk around and get it as it was thankfully at least in the right vicinity.
Every other delivery service can easily find us, It would seem that FedEx is to me what Hermes seems to be for everyone else.

I checked the tracking info on a parcel I was expecting via FedEx when it hadn’t turned up by 9PM on the appointed day (on next day service). It was marked as delivered (it wasn’t). Received no notification and their ‘proof of delivery’ was basically a blank page.

To be fair, the follow up to my rant on their online help centre-thing was quite quick and it did eventually turn up two days later.

Meantime, the vendor had pulled out all the stops to replace the missing order via a different courier which happily also turned up the same day (hat tip to https://www.grasmeregingerbread.co.uk/ — they’re lovely)

I got my local Hermes delivery person fired after the whole divide by zero debacle.
New one is really good!

They ended up being delivered a week late to the Agent Provocateur shop on the other side of London

… and that, my beautiful wife, is why one of your mates saw me coming out of there the other day 🤣

Interesting – if you go to the FedEx tracking page with the door card number (the thing they’re supposed to put through your letterbox), you can pull up all the items the driver has decided to keep for themself. He’s obviously scanned the same card repeatedly as they’re all timed within a minute of each other.

I can see sender’s names and addresses, delivery addresses, a signature in one case, account numbers – the whole lot. Is this a GDPR breach?

report it to FedEx customer services

Oh. It just turned up about 30 minutes after customer services said there was no chance of it coming today. Petty revenge forgotten now.

*new shiny stuff*