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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Here are 300 packages you have to deliver today. You only have time to deliver 200. If you use overtime I will scream at you in front of all of your coworkers and you won’t have much time to spend with your kids before they have to go to sleep. You do not have a union so I can treat you however I want and fire you without giving a reason.
Happens here all the time. It all comes down to workload. It’s terrible behaviour and totally unacceptable but you can understand it.
If they have too much to deliver they’ll just pull up to the top of the driveway to get their GPS system to record that they attempted a delivery, then they’ll put a prefilled attempted delivery card in the letter box.
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.
That message that they weren’t able to deliver it isn’t for you. It’s for their boss. So they can say hey it’s not that we didn’t go there it’s that we did go there and couldn’t deliver it!
Often times because they are so full of work they can’t even if they wanted to
We do need to lie because if we don’t scan every package we get reprimanded. And unfortunately when you scan the package there isn’t an option for “I had an unrealistic day with too many packages and want to have supper with my family for once.”
So you scan it “no one home”.
My mom made friends with her UPS driver. When she passed and stopped by with her last package I had to break the news to him and he was truly upset about the news.
At the office they can be here for 5 min to 30 min depending on the number of package delivered or picked up… plus we have free soda, coffee and espresso machine.,
Because Amazon puts their delivery people through absolute hell. They are told to pee in bottles because they will not be allowed bathroom break time, they have minutes per house on some absolutely insane shit. The contracted delivery providers are the worst, their survival depends on their numbers beating out the competition so they treat their employees like fucking animals.
The delivery company puts unrealistic expectations on the drivers. The drivers can t complete all their deliveries so they “attempt” a few. The real issue is the company itself. You complaining about the driver does nothing. Because they still have to deliver 200 the next day and the day after that and it’s only physically possible to deliver 150.
The company saves money, makes you think it’s the drivers fault, and you the recipient suffer.
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