Is it bad that my thought are that you could complain to amazon, tell them you got a note saying that the parcel was in the bin and that your bin has been emptied, with you parcel inside it...

One thing that I don't quite understand is why UK & US companies are so keen on sending items through these anyway. I hate it when they deliver packages to my door, as I'm usually not at home during standard work hours, which means that I'm usually not at home when they want to deliver my package, which in turn means that I almost always get the package late, as I need to wait for them to try two times before they want me to contact them about time/they deliver it to the place where I usually get anything too large to fit into the mail slot. So why is this so popular? (Or do they try to deliver these things at the evening in the UK or US?

Pages all stuck together?! Hellboy?! Eugh! Some delivery companies have the weirdest fetishes!:D

I do agree but am hesitant to slate them too much as they're direct competition to the Post Office.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23732088

Quote from the union "This is a company which made £94m profit last year, paid out £15.4m in bonuses to senior managers and gave its chief executive Paula Vennells a 37% increase in her earnings to £697,000, while frontline staff face job losses and pay freezes,""

I don´t know Yodel, since they don´t do business in Germany (and apparantly thankfully so), but my personal nemesis when it comes to delivery service is DHL, which belongs to "Deutsche Post", the worlds largest delivery company.

They mess up everything. Last year they managed to loose, destroy or handed over to the wrong people 18 out of 20 deliveries send to me by DHL. I actually could not help but to ask them if I was on some kind of blacklist.
One package was handed out to a car dealer.
Two were send back to the U.S. because DHL claimed my hometown would not exist.
One arrived with a 3 cm large hole of the "see through the package" type, which is a particular bummer when it happens with a flatscreen.
One package with a huge "Please do not fold!" sticker on front and back came neatly folded in the middle, which is, again, a particular bummer when the parcel contains that old record you were hunting down for you father for years.
And lots of packages just vanished into thin air.

To be fair though I must say that ONE package almost made it! One day I was sitting on my kitchen table and actually got excited when a delivery truck with the typical yellow-red DHL sign arrived at the parking place in front of my house. I even get more excited when a delivery man disembarked from the car, holding a package in his hand. Then I watched him while HE watched the 20 stairs he had to climb to reach my front door, shrugged, tossed the package back into his car and drove off. And you might have already know what happens next...Right, DHL send the package back because, apparently, my hometown does not exist.

The more I think about it, the more I am getting convinced that we can solve your problems with Yodel. Try sending them with DHL, chances are good that they will make the whole company vanish into thin air because, apparently, Great Britain does not exist.

I used to work security in one of the buildings that Amazon has offices. And they'd use several courier services, but none of them were particularly incompetent. In fact, for the most part they'd do a fairly good job.

Since I stopped working there, I have seen OnTrac trucks going around, they just don't have the level of incompetence necessary for people to pay attention to them. But, as I said, they seemed to be fairly good about delivering things correctly.

But, deliveries in general seem to depend on the region. Locally we have no problem with UPS, Fed Ex can be a real PITA and for years we were having trouble with the USPS, but in other parts of the country Fed Ex is the reliable one ans so forth.
That doesn't surprise me, my view of DHL was fairly decent from my time working security. But, they weren't available, except if you chose to use them. And if they were available from an online store, they were never the least expensive option.

I was not at all surprised that they mostly left the US, as they had virtually no presence in the first place. Primarily because the management wasn't willing to listen to advice about entering the US market. The US does have some incompetent businesses, but not all of our businesses are incompetent. Our delivery companies are usually fairly good. And just ask the UK chain Tesco about entering the US market. I don't think they even had a chance.

The Yodel delivery driver for the area where my parents live is quite umm... an incredible *bleep*.

My dad use to buy their dog food online through Amazon because it is cheaper, but Amazon use Yodel, and the driver for their area is scared of dogs so he refused to deliver just because he saw the dog in the garden on his first visit.
The best part is he would just drive up, and park for a minuet so that his system registers him stopping then drive off not even bothering to leave a note.
One day he was sitting there and my dad spotted him while I was over and knowing he should have the parcel we went out and asked for it... best part. Although he saw us come out of the house and admitted he even had the parcel, he would not hand it over to us because he could not be sure we were in fact the correct people for the parcels delivery.


Yodel I am sure have some very good workers, but most are just *bleeps* too stupid to work for any other delivery company and so give Yodel a bad name.

We don't have mail boxes, infact I don't think I have ever seen an actual Mail box. But we do have bins to throw out our waste which sit at the front door of the joint hallway for our flats.

That is a royal fuck up, how can they be soooo unreliable lol.
Yes, we have one of those also. Lassy round the corner had the exact same problem, driver refused to come into her garden because he thought the big gigantic, fluffy. tail swinging, cuddly fur ball was threatening him. He use to simply claim they were not in and drive away. It's like claiming to be afraid of an Ewok!

that makes no sense whatsoever. so all your mail ends up on the floor or bin?

seriously stupid. here in Australia if you are not home when delivery happens they will take it to local post office. they will leave you a small docket which you have to take to PO together with id and some letter proving your address...
I assumed that's normal civilized way to do things.

putting stuff in bin... that's some third world country shit.

My mind is blown at the incompetence revealed in this thread. I'm actually grateful we have the delivery companies we have in the US.

This is the UK we're talking about, unless it's a problem in some foreign black country we won't ever get a budget for that kind of thing!

Our countries are becoming so ass backwards it's better just to not question it.

If we're telling war stories, I've got a doozy. UPS is supposedly fairly reliable within the US, but as soon as they have to cross the border into Canada, hoo boy...

So I order a package from Seattle. Worth $100, weighs about 2 1/2 pounds. When it arrives in Canada, I get a note informing me that I owe an extra $55.00 in customs fees, handling fees, and processing the other fees fees (yes, really). By comparison, I ordered a similar package from Texas half a week later, and USPS delivered it the day before the UPS package (Seattle to Vancouver is a afternoon's drive, btw) and charged a $5.00 handling fee.

Tacking on 50% of the value of the package in fees seems a bit much, so I get on the phone with UPS, and they agree to waive $30.00 of the fee as a "good will offering". Unfortunately, I still don't actually have the package, because they'll only deliver it during work hours (when I'm at work) and they won't leave it anywhere until I pay the fees. I could go pick it up in person, except that their nearest pickup depot is conveniently located on an island and closes half an hour after I get off work... so, not gonna happen.

The UPS employee on the phone assures me the package will be out for delivery again the next day, so I ask my building manager to keep an eye out for it and despite her busy schedule, she kindly agrees. The delivery guy never shows up. The next day UPS tells me that they did come by but nobody answered, but I am again assured that the package will definitely be out this time, so we try the same thing. The delivery guy never shows up.

At this point I can't keep asking my manager to wait for my package, so I call up UPS again and try something different. UPS continues to insist that the previous delivery attempts were made and we just didn't answer, but whatever. I ask, could the delivery guy possibly leave it at the UPS Store outlet down the street from me, so I can pick it up after work? Impossible, I'm told. Why? Because they would have to get the manager's permission. Which apparently is just too much work for them, but they give me the number and tell me I'm welcome to have a crack at it.

Five minutes later I've got the manager's permission (wow, that was hard) and I call UPS back to make the arrangements. The new employee I talk to apparently didn't get the memo, because she spills the beans and tells me that the previous delivery attempts were not made and that in fact the package went missing a week ago and nobody's had any idea where it's been all this time. (That is, all this time that they've been swearing up and down that they would and did try to deliver and that it's my fault for not being there.)

Since I'm already on the line, I request that if they do find the package, to please deliver it to their UPS Store outlet on [street]. What's the address, I'm asked. I don't know, shouldn't you know that? I reply. I'm told that they "don't have access to that kind of information." So I log onto their own website and read them the address of their own store to their own employee over the phone. Then she tells me that she'll need the store manager's phone number, because, again, they "don't have access to that kind of information". This being the phone number that the previous employee just gave to me.

i do eventually get the package, and a few weeks later I get a letter from UPS. I naively imagine that it might be some sort of an apology. Nope! It's a bill for the $30.00 they waived as a "good will offering."

Good god, I hope you didn't pay that fee. I would of told them very *ahem* politely where they can shove it.

This thread made me cringe even more than that blood test thread >_>

On topic, I've gotten fantastic service when ordering from the US using UPS, absolutely no problems whatsoever (although shipping time is a little messy. I've had one package arrive in 2 days from placing the order, and pretty much the exact same thing from the same place arrive 2 weeks later.)