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Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

I live in France and in the working hours of the delivery guys I'm at work in a different city. I ordered a number of things to my personal address, and the story is typically like: "package delivered" with some strange message from the delivery guy where to find it, or no message at all. Out of the last 3 things I ordered, 2 didn't get to me (I made a claim on Amazon and they reimbursed me, no questions asked - at least), and 1 other was delivered to a shop three streets from my place, and after 2 weeks when no one came to get the thing, a good guy from the shop noticed my phone number on the box and called me.

I try to avoid buying physical stuff in the internet now, way too much stress.

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Believe me, even if you are home 100% of the time, packages will still not get delivered because "nobody was home".

IIRC DHL is especially prone to this. I think the drivers try to catch up time or whatever.

Wonder if we have it all wrong. If we paid for shipping on receipt there would be motivation to deliver.

Some of the vendors allow you to select the delivery company. I like this.

It's pretty hard to get back to a seller and try to explain him the delivery company he is using is potentially scamming, especially as it only affects me (the receiver), not the shipper.

In the UK we can get our money back if the goods don't make it into your hands. It's up to the seller / courier to prove otherwise although it's usually a battle arguing with them.

Royal Mail delivered a £560 multimeter to the wrong address and to a signature which wasn't mine. Never saw it again. That took a nightmare battle from hell to get sorted.

Royal Mail is just terrible at doing anything it seems.

This is the same in every single country. However, if the mail say it was delivered then what do you do? You lose.

I actually found that in the UK at least, you get on twitter and call them thieving bastards repetitively until they are fed up with you and just give you the money to shut up :)

It also happens in germany. I once talked to a deliery guy from DHL. He told me, he has 3 minutes for a delivery. That's insane. Just one red traffic light and the 3 minute windows is fucked up.

When you call dhl you only get lame exuses. "Maybe you doorbell isn't working?" Sure, DHL, sure.

The person you call almost certainly has no actual insight into the problem or way to contact the driver

Yeah I imagine the drivers do this to save time when they're behind schedule.

Which makes me feel bad for the drivers, really. I'm gonna guess that they have some very tough schedules.

You don’t need to guess, it’s been documented. Most have impossible schedules. Ugly industry, and it would be costly to make it less ugly. So we all look away.

DHL is mostly subcontracted to local companies. Yes, drivers do that when they have a residential address, because they cannot pull the same trick with companies at factory/office hours, they hope it goes unnoticed with individuals.

But I also have a DHL driver doing the opposite: you stay at home all day and nobody rings; then you notice that the parcel is marked as delivered on the website. What? You get outside and you see the parcel was thrown in your yard over the wall/fence/portal. You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.

So he just didn't bother to ring the doorbell to save 20 seconds. He saves 20 seconds and you lose several hours waiting for him...

Also, in this subcontracting company, the drivers have very bad equipment, they do not have winter tyres (and we are talking about a mountain area...), they do not have enough large enough vans, so the drivers try to ditch as many parcels as possible in any 'possible' way because otherwise they have no room for pickups...

The driver even showed up one day with a regular compact car... He had to come back.

> But I also have a DHL driver doing the opposite: you stay at home all day and nobody rings; then you notice that the parcel is marked as delivered on the website. What? You get outside and you see the parcel was thrown in your yard over the wall/fence/portal. You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.

IN cases like that, I would have a very hard ethical time in pushing that issue of fraud onto the driver. To be honest, I haven't done that... but the thought would definitely cross my mind.

I wouldn't think twice. I would absolutely do that. Why? While in school I was working as a delivery driver and never resorted to shit like that.

And we were not only pressed for time. We were paid by delivered parcel. Nothing else counted.

And we had to deliver the packets that were not successfully delivered to the central logistics station by 6pm.

So if we didn't perform we were f..ed.

> While in school I was working as a delivery driver and never resorted to shit like that.

How long ago was that? Maybe the service has gotten worse because the pay/reward system has gotten worse.

> You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.

Depending on carrier, this has hellish consequences for customers who end up having to file loss/damage claims against the carrier. Your signature attests that you received it and it's intact, so when the signature is forged attesting to such, any claims filed are summarily denied.

(Consumers usually get their money back from the shipper as a matter of customer service, but the shipper still eats the loss.)

This happens every single time with PostNord, the postal service in Sweden and Denmark. Every, single, time.

Second that.

As I understand it (no personal experience, just hearsay), the quotas given to drivers are unrealistically aggressive, encouraging this behavior.

Amazon lockers are the best thing since sliced bread. They put the ball back in your court to pick it up, when you have time. Removes the stress completely and makes ordering pleasant again.

Keep an eye out for them, if you can.

This kinda thing is extremely good and I'm surprised it hasn't caught on in a bigger way. Many (most?) purchases are made online these days, but when you do so you have to make one of a couple of awkward choices:

1. request a delivery at work, let the receptionists at your office sign for the package and very politely thank them each time (and don't do this too often)

2. place the order to be delivered at your home address, knowing that you won't be there and that you'll have to pick up the "you were out..." slip, and duck out of work and cross town later in the week to the post-office sometime during opening hours and suffer the queues there.

The reason I use the word "awkward" is that I feel like I'm misusing some facilities no matter what I do (expecting a receptionist to handle my packages, or making a postman bring a package all the way to my flat and then all the way back home and fill out forms etc).

These temp lockers are such a great idea.

Fully agree. Unfortunately the lockers are not very popular yet in France. But I've seen a few added in the last months in my area, hope it catches the steam, because it's way better.

The problem though is that most of the time I can not choose the delivery company, and I've only seen La Poste having the lockers.

With the all the home deliveries that people have these days I think it should be mandatory for all new constructed condos etc to have delivery lockers. The item gets delivered to the locker the code is messaged to you retrieve when you get back home. The current place I am living in has the security gate intercom dial my handphone. So for any package delivery I tell the guy I will open the door for him but I am not at home so to leave the item outside my apartment door.

We have a few Amazon Lockers in Paris and the suburbs. It's awesome. A lot better than the usual "Relais Colis".

Just flash the barcode from the email, and it opens the appropriate locker. It even lets you open multiple ones with a single barcode if you received multiple packages the same day.

> request a delivery at work, let the receptionists at your office sign for the package and very politely thank them each time (and don't do this too often)

Everyone in my office does this, although we don't have a dedicated receptionist and the job normally falls to the office manager instead. It doesn't even cross my mind as a misuse of company resources. Is this something that would be considered inappropriate in other places?

It depends, I think in a larger office it can get a bit out of hand. My previous workplace was a few hundred people and the pile of packages was a little shocking, especially around christmas time. My current workplace the downstairs reception is shared between a number of companies, so they're not even our employees which makes it a bit worse.

It could be that this is all fine and I'm overthinking it - so maybe take what I"m saying with a pinch of salt :-)

As a counter-example: we have a receptionist and a dedicated mailroom which is staffed for full business hours. I do imagine it gets nuts around christmas, but it's essentially an office perk / honestly I'd consider it something that should be expected by default - the alternative is, as mentioned, home delivery when you're not home, which is ridiculously ineffective and has problems with theft.

I almost never have to return anything but the one time I had a defective item I decided to use a locker for the return exchange and it never worked, they were always all full (London, UK) so then I had to end up going to a post office anyway.

I'm curious, is it uncommon to have packages delivered to the mailroom at your place of work? That's what I've done for the last 4 years and I've never had a problem.

I experienced the receptionist losing track of my stuff once and it was a really uncomfortable situation because, obviously, you're still colleagues and you don't want to get too pushy, but at the same time, where the hell is the stuff I paid for? After that I stopped having stuff delivered to my office.

And anyway you may not want everyone to know what you are buying.

It is not uncommon, but at a mid-sized company it is a bit problematic: when the receptionist has to handle private parcels for a couple of individuals, that is OK; but when there are 100-200 employees and they regularly order non-work related stuff at their company address, it becomes a burden on the receptionist, burden that is not part of what the company pays him for.

So :

* small company where everyone takes care of (his own) deliveries: OK.

* smallish company company where there is a receptionist: OK because it does not happen too often.

* middle-sized company: not OK.

* large company with a dedicated mail/parcel/delivery service: I guess it depends on formal work agreements.

-We solved this in a simple manner at a former employer - we just had everybody who wanted something sent to work have it addressed to such-and-such, room 40.

Room 40 was a bench behind the warehouse reception.

Of course, there are potential pitfalls here - say, assuming your colleagues to be honest, for instance - but to the best of my knowledge, we never lost a parcel in years. (Which is more than could be said for anything entering the murky depths of our ERP system...)

At AOL in late 2001 they insisted that employees cease receiving non-work packages at work. The legit concern was the anthrax being mailed to DC area offices. That was also just past "peak AOL" so I was soon freed from this problem, with a decent sverance to boot.

I have found ordering from B&M's via their websites and picking the thing up at the store bypasses this whole problem.

Maybe... I've used them three times, I think. Once everything was good, the next time I couldn't retrieve the package because the touchscreen and barcode reader were malfunctioning, and then the third time I got someone else's package and mine vanished into thin air. (I was able to dox the other person and leave their package where they could get it though.) The company where I work has essentially the same thing, and seemingly more reliable, if I'm willing to wait an extra day for it to get through their system.

I mean, most things I don't need to sign for and I can just pick them up on my doorstep when I get home, which is way more convenient than that.

Every time I've looked for one in NYC, there are none around within 5 miles.

I've rented a mailbox at a private post office for years to do this. It's basically a subcontracted receiving department, and they can deal with parcels from any vendor or courier for me.

It has been my experience that if you order with a credit card and the item is not delivered you will not be charged. I usually let the credit card company handle it to avoid the hassle.

Also being in France, I find that the most reliable and practical way to get something shipped is to use a "point relai" (when delivery at work is out of the picture because of company policies). Delivery services generally know better how to find them and deal with them, since other people use them too.

When your package is damaged, some will even offer to add a note to your delivery, without you asking, in case there's a problem later.

I order very regularly from Amazon, and I think I have never had a single problem receiving packages this way, and it's pretty easy to find one on your way from work or somewhere that suits you. Some of them are even open on Sunday, depending on what their main business is, very convenient ...

Yes I'm trying to use point relais right now whenever possible. However oftentimes Amazon says to me that the items I want to buy can't be delivered to point relais (probably there are restrictions on size and type of products).

This kinda stuff makes me appreciate being in Japan (for now). Cannot beat Japanese customer service. Gonna miss that the most.

It seems to me that being an expat in Japan is a win win with no downside, as one can enjoy everything that works within their society while avoiding all the social pressures the Japanese suffer.

We are planning a trip soon to investigate our insight.

Haven't been there, but anecdata from my friend who spent 2 years there says yes, but you have to probably work remotely, because Japanese companies are very rigid, hierarchical and conservative - culture clash might be hard and you might be suffocating.

Agreed. But working remotely from Japan can be a great lifestyle if you can pull it off. Almost all of Japan's downsides come from working for traditional Japanese companies.

The wages are also very low for computer programming compared to the US, despite a cost of living that is not much lower.

Bienvenue à Colis Privé.

This shitty company is the worst delivery one I know but for some reason Amazon France uses it to deliver to me (west of Paris).

I either get a "we were there" note when I was home, or nothing.

I complained to Amazon but it is maybe time to get it to social keyword with a #DropThatShittyCompany or something.

Is it not possible to have stuff shipped to our workplace address. I've been doing that for years.

Use a PaketShop, much better. Not sure how they're called in proper english.

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