UKC

I, and quite a few other people I know in Spain have always had difficulty delivering stuff here. I have a really easy address, a GPS would find it instantly. Are Fed Ex as crap in the UK or is it just over here?
I'm concerned because my copy of Peak Rock is floating about somewhere with Spanish Fed Ex and I'm getting really peed off with the company.

In reply to Al Evans:

Naah, they are crap elsewhere too.

FEDEX Germany have just managed to mislay piece of electronic equipment costing around 5k on its way back to service. As for FEDEX UK, a few years ago a shipment of highly expensive biochemicals I tried to send to the US from Cambridge was rediscovered, four weeks later, in a storage room in Norwich, of course minus the dry ice and by then completely worthless.

CB

In reply to cb294:

This could be the answer: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/12/02/amazon-drones-prime-air_n_437034...

I live in a village with no house numbers or street names. So my address is just name, name of village, post code (which is for the whole commune, one of the biggest, geographically in France, and the name of the commune).

This is fine for the postman, who knows everyone but couriers get problems and I get stuff delivered from Amazon every week. Quite often, they give up, leave it at the post office and then the postman delivers it later.

I find also that a lot of the big couriers outsource to smaller white van men which means success is variable.

In reply to Al Evans:

They seem from my experience to be one of the more professional couriers (Yodel being the back end of unprofessional, by comparison), so maybe just bad luck.

Neil

In reply to Neil Williams:

yes they aint the worse in my experience.
However that really isnt setting the bar high.

In reply to dissonance:

Oh for the days when the GPO had a monopoly on this sort of thing!

In reply to dissonance:

Actually I have to say that Correos in Spain seem to handle this sort of thing really well (and not expensively).

In reply to Al Evans:

Post and parcel delivery is a sector where competition does not help most of the population in any way. In large cities it may be workable if, as in the UK, there is a good postal code system or similar. Elsewhere, it simply causes mayhem.

Once you have several competing organisations, the service is permanently rubbish because no single provider has staff who are working intensely enough in a small area to know it thoroughly. The traditional 'postie' knowledge then exists nowhere.

It's not a complicated concept but clearly too complicated for Tory politicians.

In reply to Jim Fraser:

Where competition does help consumers is price. Most people expect 'free' delivery on internet purchases. Whilst free to the consumer it has to be paid for by the retailer, competition between delivery firms is pretty competitive to win retailers business. This does have a knock on effect in that courier firms will cut costs as much as possible to stay competitive. Consumers now expect cheap prices with free and fast delivery and sometimes need to be realistic that things won't run perfectly all the time. I work for a company that shifts hundreds of parcels a week with delivery firms and to be fair to them we have 'issues' with only 2 or 3 parcels a week at the most.

In reply to Jim Fraser:



I suspect the Royal Mail maybe routing for a SDP victory next year, then they will probably lose the big headache of Highland deliveries.

In reply to Al Evans:

In my experience they're all fairly toss. The quality of service depends a lot more on the man with the van at the end, than the company/franchise that they're working for.

In reply to Neil Williams:



I've spent one day working in a yodel depot, couldn't agree more...