I’ve experienced this in several different countries so it’s not just one or two services. We could be sitting near the front door eating and be able to look outside when the tracking will change, in real time, to say they failed to reach us. It’s clear as day no one even showed up. Why not just be honest and say “we can’t get to it today. Trying again tomorrow.”
They have to know that half the time the resident knows they didn’t even try? Shit happens. Sometimes there’s just too many packages and you can’t get to them all. No need to lie.
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Tldr is shit pay, unrealistic workload/deadlines and often insecure work/contracted status.
(This is mostly based on my experience implementing solutions for depots in the uk so might differ for the US)
Alot of couriers have really tight deadlines made by (often badly configured) software. In essence they have 2-4 minutes to find a parking space, park, find your package in their van, get to your door, wait for you to answer and get moving again.
The routes themselves are often optimistic and doesn’t really deal well with traffic (very often it calculates “average traffic” rather than something more specifc) and you start running g out of time.
Alot of couriers only get paid per delivery attempt so hanging around waiting for you to answer will bring down their hourly rate and for true Contracters once you include va hire, fuel, on the road costs etc they make close to minimum wage.
This creates a bad conflict of interest and a lack of care as if you’re basically earning minimum wage you tend not to care so much.
Couriers have been on a race to the bottom for awhile and the lack of skilled drivers (pre sat nav and route optimisation job being a multi drop driver was a reasonably skilled profession. now it’s just do you have a license) has fend into poor management often lacking in experience of being a driver which helps create further scheduling problems and a drop in morale.
Customer etas (the your parcel will come at x texts) also don’t help, prior to this skilled drivers often modified their routes based on traffic roadworks, unexpected delays etc. If you were due to deliver outside a school at 2:30 but are now running behind so wo t get there till 3 you might skip it and come back at 4 once school traffics gone. You can’t do that now as you need to be there by 330 and now you’re right up against the end of the window and can’t easily park so you just skip those jobs…
Finally the incentives (thanks to ecommerce) to improve this arnt there. You the end customer have no choice in who delivers your item and commerce companies tend to go with the cheapest courier until customer complaints/lost items become to much to ignore. There’s little incentive for most companies to use a quaility delivery service so these companies have either gone bust or gutted what made them quaility.
I dont see it being something the market as it is can sort out.
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