[naravara]

Interesting. In my city it's UPS that I found to be unreliable, most often by marking things as "undeliverable" without actually bothering trying to deliver them.

At one point I actually got an email notice that they just tried to deliver a package and nobody was home despite the fact that I had literally been reading a book on the front porch for the past 3 hours. Nobody came by.

[basseq]

I've heard a lot of similar stories, and I wonder two things:

1. Is some of that volume bad addresses or poor wayfinding? Something about how the delivery person ended up at the wrong location and didn't know where to go, versus bad actors.

2. Why haven't delivery companies cracked down on this? Maybe they have, but I still hear about it a lot.

[Tomte]

> Why haven't delivery companies cracked down on this? Maybe they have, but I still hear about it a lot.

I don't know about the American package delivery space, but assuming it's somewhat resembling the German one (sub-sub-subsidiaries, work days until 11pm, because you've got a quota etc.): because it is impossible to fulfil the quota. So you get creative, fill out some "did not open door" papers and hope you can get around to delivering them the next day.

And it's impossible to fulfil the quota because that's directly profit. So companies can choose between abysmal service (but still not so bad that customers would leave, because everyone is playing that game) and lower profits. They have zero incentive to "crack down".

[Majromax]

> Something about how the delivery person ended up at the wrong location and didn't know where to go, versus bad actors.

That's still a "bad actor." A driver is ultimately responsible for knowing the area they're delivering to. Wayfinding is a very convenient crutch, but if it fails and the driver has insufficient local knowledge it's still a skill failure.

> 2. Why haven't delivery companies cracked down on this? Maybe they have, but I still hear about it a lot.

Because their contract is with the shipper, rather than the recipient. Even a complaint from the recipient is more a PR problem than an economic one.

Moreover, a recipient who accepts redelivery or goes to the depot for pickup doesn't even impose a significant additional cost on the delivery company.

[rtkwe]

I had a similar rough patch where things were marked delivered or undeliverable for them to show up the next day almost like the delivery person was faking deliveries to shuffle their numbers around.