I know I do many strange things, but one of them that I don’t think is that strange, is that I will shop online and add things to my basket as I go along, but when I go to check out, I will not order something if the only postal options are Royal Mail.

Does anyone else do this? Due to working and where I live, I will always be left the dreaded calling card, then my local collection office is only open 0900 – 1145, I leave on my commute for work around 0700 and dont get home till 1630ish meaning I cant get in there till Saturday morning, however this then impacts my ability to go out on the trails and ride!

For those with an interest I am really starting to like collect plus, not only do I get a text when my item is ready for collection, the returns process is mega easy and the hours of opening are better as its a newsagents.

i have stuff delivered to work, I’m always in 🙁

Collect plus is very useful for a lot of people.

Royal Mail in general these days is a poor delivery service for parcels, doesn’t offer the tracking and ability of the big players like DPD and doesn’t offer the convenience of collect plus.

Where I used to live I’d avoid anyone using city link. They could never find our house. It was slightly hard to find but all the others managed. No issue with rm but pur postie is happy to leave signed for stuff in the porch and we have quite a few elderly or wfh neighbours so stuff rarely goes to the depot (which is a 10 min walk away anyway)

Does anyone else do this?

I don’t, I usually get stuff delivered to work. Do you need to religiously ride your bike every single Saturday morning?

DPD is a firm favourite of mine.

I normally take a punt but on a few occasions I’ve asked the courier company to return to sender as I’ve been unable to get hold of my parcel as they will on deliver when I’m at work, have collection offices miles away or only open during my working hours. Less likely to take a punt on a more expensive item. Yodel left my new phone on the doorstep. I returned some books to amazon at Xmas that were left outside while I was on holiday and had been destroyed by rain.

I actually have a preference for Royal Mail as they will often drop off with one of the people on my street who is likely to be in. Or I can pop in to the collection place as it is on my way to work.

I won’t use Yodel. I’d rather pay extra to use Royal Mail. Our RM are good. If we miss them at the house the sorting office is 5mins away. Opening hours not a problem.

I should have added, my work gets funny about having packages delivered to the office.

Do you need to religiously ride your bike every single Saturday morning?

*I’d say the majority of Saturdays, planning and thinking of my Saturday ride generally gets me through the Monday – Friday boredom! (not sure how to use the quote function properly!)

Royal Mail are excellent for me.

But to answer the broader question, I’ll not order from anyone who wants to charge more because I live North of Perth.

I’ve never been put off, but

then my local collection office is only open 0900 – 1145

what the hell? Mine is open 7-12 Mon-Sat with extended hours to 20.00 (iirc) on a Wednesday!

If they’re Yodel only they can FRO

Nah, I have things delivered to work.

All couriers are terrible, just terrible – we have 3-4 deliveries a day here, all sorts of different providers, they all have an equally bad failure rate. They all ignore “DO NOT PASS TO NEIGHBOUR” they will all misread our address at time and sometime deliver a very expensive bit of kit with “very expensive bit of computer kit” on the box (or that’s how people read “HP, “Dell” or worse “Apple” to a neighbour of someone who has an address like ours, but importantly not ours.

This usually means the hairdressers in the village who will never let us know it’s been delivered even though it has our number on the box and will hold onto it hoping we won’t notice, even sometimes play, “ohhhh that box, I hadn’t noticed that” when they’ve spent a week tripping over a full-sized Tower Server worth £5k.

Yes but the other way round. I will only order if its royal mail ‘cos non of the couriers can find my flat first time but royal mail can – and if I have to pick it up the royal mail depot is nearer.

BOth Hermes and Yodel have failed to deliver or even attempt to deliver and lied about it.

https://www.royalmail.com/track-your-item
most parcels have a 3d scan on parcels which you can find out when and where it was delivered
Royal Mail Tracked is very popular for parcels this work has gone mental Royal Mail have been a bit slow on the uptake but we are getting there!
DPD are very good

Local royal mail depot is open 7-7 mon- friday ( till 8pm wed) and 7 -2 sat.

All my parcels (bar really big ones) get delivered to a company in town called doddle.

Therefore doesn’t matter who delivers it or when (providing it’s between 8am-8pm).

I did used to be a bit picky about delivery options, then my Mum retired, and since i tend to visit a couple of times a week, she now has a new full time job signing for my Wiggle boxes 🙂

The last place I get things delivered to is home. Works, friends houses if they’re in, friends work places, etc… Basically anywhere that people can be gauranteed to be in.

I generally just deliver to work. Occasionally that gives me a challenge in getting it home (I cycle or use the train), but generally it works well.

RM are fine with us (but we do live in a rural location), they’ll leave a card “package in xxx” or “signed for and left with neighbour”. Yodel are fine too: “Where do you live? Oh, that’s by X isn’t it? I’ll sign for it if you want and leave it in …”

The worst one was always City Link, short of you being sat on the doorstep when they passed you’d always have to go to the depot.

Oikeith, have you managed to have a chat with your postie before?

If not, why not catch him/her when you’re home on a Saturday and discuss a possible safeplace for future?
I’ve given my postie access to my outhouse and he is fine to bung everything in there.

It’s a win-win. He gets an easy delivery, and I get the delivery without trekking to the office.

As above ^^^ create a Safeplace (out of sight and weatherproof) so that your postie can leave packets for you. You don’t necessarily have to collect the item from the delivery office you can arrange a redelivery to your address or a neighbour on a day of your choice.

Nope I work shifts so generally not an issue.

Our postie and collect + guy know what to do if I’m nights or out too.

For me i will always try and use Royal Mail, but i live in a small rural village, everyone talks and knows postman, if you’re not in, it goes across to village shop, when you can knock on back door at 9pm!

They also drive well on local roads, where as the idiots that drive the DPD/Yodel/Other small vans drive absolute k*obs, i’ve had a number of close calls with their vehicles commuting on bike as they fly round single lane roads

No problems with Royal Mail at all.
From our local depot, to the Postie on foot, to the guy in the local PO, all of them spot on. Use them or lose them as far as I’m concerned.

Don’t get me wrong, some excellent couriers out there, but a world where Yodel are the only option is one we desperately don’t need.

My workplace is next to a Yodel depot & they are the worst drivers I’ve ever seen. Truly mental driving standards. Lines of vans double parked, grass verges torn up by them. And they can’t read, we have a god damn 20ft high illuminated sign that they fail to notice & turn up thinking we are a Yodel depot.

I’m lucky, In live in a rural village where everyone knows everyone; and that includes most of the local parcel drivers, so they know where to leave stuff, even the directly employed ones such as UPS seem to be able to get it.

There is, of course, one exception. Blooming Yodel.

I will never ever order from anyone where they are the only delivery option. However, as that only appears to be planet x, who I wouldn’t touch with yours, it doesn’t inconvenience me much.

Really interesting stuff – we use Royal Mail for almost all our website orders and would never have through to offer another delivery option for customers to choose.

Will look into adding this as it seems like something some people would appreciate.

Always delivered to work no matter who is delivering.

Given the option I’d only ever use royal mail if ordering online for myself – yodel and myhermes are terrible in my area, I’ve often had missed deliveries even though I’ve been in all day specificly to get a parcel.
Never had an issue with RM delivering stuff. However if I’m sending stuff I’ll use who ever is cheaper, more often than not it’s not Rm.

Pretty much everything goes to work and I’ve only had one issue with couriers not finding the clearly labelled office block. I never order on a Thursday or Friday to avoid any weekend delivery mix ups.

I generally take the view it is the retailer’s job to get it safely to me. If their courier screws up then they must sort it. So far I’ve been lucky.

I’ve got one of those garden storage tubs down the side of the house. Everything goes there, I just add a second line to my address to flag it to whichever courier is used. My Paypal defaults to it so don’t even have to change the address.

This is much easier than trying to use the ‘note to courier’ box which often is limited in text, or infuriating, just gives you common options like in the porch, garage etc.

I’ve only had one issue, and that was some slightly nutty bloke who rang me back to have a mini-rant about the parcel needing to be checked on delivery before signing, (I told him I can almost see the UPS depot from my window so no bother…even so they wouldn’t allow me to open the parcel anyway…policy apparently!) And if it gets delivered to home, I’ve signed my life away so they don’t need a signature anyway!

Everything goes in there, and on the rare occasion I’m in, the courier exclaims he thought there was no chance the parcel would fit in the box anyway…its about 1.5 m long so most stuff does.

Got a padlock hanging inside but only one courier has felt the need to lock the parcel in there, and it wasn’t even valuable.

OP – save yourself time by checking delivery options before filling your basket?

Get a porch. Everything we order just gets left in there.

…or a non-working live in lover

Recently Royal Mail have changed my local collection point to the otherside of central Cardiff which is a right royal Royal pain-in-the-arse. They used to drop it at the post office that’s about 10mins walk. I imagine it’s some sort of cost cutting exercise since privatisation.

I am in the same boat as OP. Plus we aren’t allowed to have stuff delivered to work (I know what a bunch of kill joys). Luckily our central sorting off thingy is open till 8pm, but you still have to drive through central Cardiff *shudder*

Glad to hear I am not the only that avoids certain delivery companies!

DMCK16 & Muke: I live in a terraced town house, I have no front garden, side alley or access to a service lane etc. I might try catch the postie one morning as when there is a free text option I will ask for the package to be left next door where a retired couple live, however for some reason they choose to ignore this and take it back to the depot! I do know also that depending on the size of the parcel it might not be the normal postie delivering the package but someone delivering many parcels across the town in a van.

Boxelder: I am getting better at this, although sometimes when I find something I have spent ages looking for or when something is a bargain I’ll click first and check postage as checkout

They used to drop it at the post office that’s about 10mins walk

Its likely that your small local post-office shouldn’t have been excepting the parcels from your postie.
Independent (non crown) post-offices get paid for every item that goes through them, larger offices that have storage facilities can scan track and trace items so that it shows up on the tracking (they get paid per item scanned).
Smaller offices that don’t have this ability can’t and won’t get paid for it being collected from them. In addition If the postie leaves the item at these small offices, as they can’t scan them through the system technically is still with him and will show as ‘undelivered’.

If I saw a co using ParcelForce I wouldn’t buy from them.
ParcelForce try to deliver during working hours, then leave a card saying they’ll attempt delivery again – so they try again during working hours, (they don’t do weekends) what’s the bloody point? Then they take it back to their depot which isn’t in the same town, or the next one or the next one. It’s fairly close to my work, but I cycle there. Shittest service possible.

Same.
[list]
[*]ShittyLink (before they went) – always left a card, even if you were in. Depot inaccessible to working humans.[/*]
[*]Yodel – dump it in a hedge in the rain and/or leave a card with lies on it.[/*]
[*]Hermes – blatantly lie about everything.[/*]
[*]RM – actually pretty good in our area and the depot is actually open at reasonable times.[/*]
[*]DPD – gold standard, worth paying extra for.[/*]
[*]Amazon logistics – variable; usually opt for Amazon Locker if available.[/*][/list]

Have avoided RM since I ordered a car jack to be delivered to my work address – large business that has been there for years – and they delivered it elsewhere, but as they had a signature, told me in no uncertain terms to **** off! Tried all the complaints procedures (which were a nightmare!)with no luck – since then will trust RM with Chrimbo cards and nothing else.