[pjc50]

Parcel delivery is such a classic principal-agent problem; the customer contracts with a seller, who then subcontracts with a delivery company. But because there's layers in the middle the delivery companies can't compete on actual customer satisfaction, just on being cheap for the vendors.

[ThePadawan]

I do my best to tell sellers this.

I recently tried to find out where to buy a new mattress online. Usually I get them IKEA and that's fine, but their shipping is so expensive, it's generally only worth it if you boy a whole lot of large items at once.

I talked to the customer repo of another shop to inquire what vendor they used for shipping and what would happen if I wasn't home - and they told me they used DPD.

Turns out that DPD's "we missed you" service is "you have to go to our distribution center to pick up your package". As mentioned above, that would have been a 1h15min train journey (one-way) with multiple changes. Carrying a mattress.

I sincerely hope the customer rep actually understood why I told them that this was an immediate non-starter for me. Especially since I regularly missed packages because the mail carrier simply didn't attempt delivery at all.

[nicoburns]

My experience has been that DPD has by far the best delivery service. Not only can you reschedule delivery for a specific day, but you can do so in advance, or arrange a new address for the package to be delivered to. Perhaps this varies by location?

[ThePadawan]

Of course it does! It's just that in my experience, rearranging delivery details still requires someone in the chain to give a shit.

The delivery person who wouldn't deliver the package on Monday is not going to give a shit if they're instructed to deliver on Tuesday 9am-11am instead, they're going to show up at 4pm and still act like they're doing me a favor.

What am I gonna do? I've already paid for the service, so the seller won't care. DPD won't care, they already got paid by the seller.