Why are couriers so slack?

Paid for a 1 to 2 day service on a package which was handed off to the local courier in Germany on Thursday afternoon. It has then sat in a facility in Dortmund till late yesterday evening instead of landing here by Saturday. Que lots of increasingly aggressive emails to the primary courier and then their representative in the UK and suddenly after either no responses or being told it's not their problem and some more quite nasty emails from me the package is now in less than 10 hours not only in the UK but across in Lancashire about to be sent out for delivery this morning.

Why not just send it in a timely fashion to start with? Why is it so hard for me delivery service to deliver a package. Its not as if it wasn't paid for at a suitable rate or not given accurate information. It was just sat on for no obvious reason.

And relax. I am calm. I am in my special fortress of isolation. This is not making me angry.

I run a small business, and we've tried almost every courier there is - they are ALL terrible. Most just don't care at all, others are incompetent. We haven't tried UPS because of their rates, but then even if they're good, the customer doesn't want to pay high delivery charges. We were using Yodel up until last week, but it was a complete joke. Their phone line is an automated system, and their online Chat service is beyond belief. We've gone back to Hermes, but you can't phone them when there's a problem as there isn't a phone number!!! If anyone starts up a company offering decent rates and excellent service, they will sweep up all the business.

Barry wrote: I run a small business, and we've tried almost every courier there is - they are ALL terrible. Most just don't care at all, others are incompetent. We haven't tried UPS because of their rates, but then even if they're good, the customer doesn't want to pay high delivery charges. We were using Yodel up until last week, but it was a complete joke. Their phone line is an automated system, and their online Chat service is beyond belief. We've gone back to Hermes, but you can't phone them when there's a problem as there isn't a phone number!!! If anyone starts up a company offering decent rates and excellent service, they will sweep up all the business.

It is interesting to hear the business perspective and as a seller on eBay in a non business way I tend to agree. I was doing well with Herpes after they had a poor rep about a year or so back but now and then, like fish and chips, a bad one crops up. I like live tracking but it is not always commonly available. Some are better at collections, PF can be pretty good in that but their 24 hour delivery can take two days and the xmall print always covers all sins. and one company states if it finds unacceptable stuff they will destroy it (airguns). Some do weekends, some don't so they lose.
So I use parcel2go and generally pick the cheapest but wouldn't it be nice to rely on just the one.
Some charge extra if I use Paypal. Someone buys off me and pays with PP then I have to pay more to post.....annoying.
On receiving I have had stuff tantalisingly nearby and ungettable over a weekend, stuff broken, lots lost........as said they are all much of a muchness but UPS are possibly as good as it gets and that's my recommendation.
I could write a book.

Parcel2Go are cheap, but heaven help you if a parcel goes missing. Try getting them on the phone! And that's an important issue, because if a parcel of ours goes astray, we (who provide a first class service) immediately inform the customer by phone, then try and find it for them. If it's disappeared forever (happened once) then we have to send out a secondary parcel, and claim. So we REALLY need to be able to talk to the courier to see if we need to send the customer another while they find it. If we can't talk to them then we, and the customer, are in complete limbo. We had Hermes deliver one a few months ago, and they said there was no one at home so they left it in a porch. We didn't like that, so we phoned the customer to apologise. "No," she says, "He handed it to me". Quite why Hermes decided to tell us a complete load of tosh, we'll never know. ParcelForce are absurdly expensive. They are good (never had a problem) but twice the price of couriers like Hermes and Yodel. Like I said, I could say to the customer that we'll send it by ParcelForce for added security, but no one wants to pay twice the price! We were once desperate to get a parcel out the same day, and took it to our local UPS centre. Then they said they'd have to unwrap it to check the contents, before re-wrapping it! We told them where to get off.

It was parcel farce that i had problems with well them in the UK and Go Like Snails on the continent, if they're supposed to be one of the better ones then there's no hope. I guess that the problem is that whilst the people at the top of these organisations probably have a considerable interest in providing excellent service, their organisations are so large and unwieldy that once below middle management there are that many staff who are only there for payday that no matter what the company ethos is an attitude of "near enough" becomes prevalent.

I blame the internet.

We'll soon find out if they coped with Black Friday this year.