[sebra]

Apples only delivery choice in Sweden is UPS which is notorious for messing up deliveries here. I ordered a MacBook and the delivery is supposed to be hand over with signature required. The UPS guy left it outside my apartment door in the stairwell in the morning. I was lucky it was still there when I got home from work. Apparently I signed that delivery (the UPS guy probably signed it himself...)

[danpalmer]

Delivery drivers in the UK regularly do this. They get to 11am, realise they won’t meet the delivery slots for the afternoon deliveries, so bulk mark everything as delivered and sign themselves, then take their time and deliver after the slot later that day.

This is illegal. Signatures are legally protected in the UK (and elsewhere I’m sure) and forging a signature is a crime. I got like 3 Hello Fresh deliveries in a row when I complained of their repeated forgeries before I cancelled.

[switch007]

I'm curious how the signature is represented though. If it doesn't state your name underneath, is it forgery?

Did the driver try to make the signature look like your name?

And did the company accuse you of signing it?

Not trying to defend them mind. I just feel like their legal departments have thought of this

[danpalmer]

They generally just scribble the name. Generally when I speak to support representatives and say that I got a delivery confirmation with a signature on it pretending to be mine they get extremely apologetic.

I don't know if it needs to state the name next to it, that's a good question, and may also depend on jurisdiction, but I would suggest that if a delivery signature was just writing a name then it wouldn't carry the necessary weight for proving receipt.

[Tempest1981]

Is this the real reason Amazon has their drivers take pictures of each delivery? I assume they track with GPS too.

[switch007]

This is also security theatre at some companies. One famously will take a photo of your parcel in a bush in a garden 3 streets over (Hermes)

Though at the more scrupulous companies they take photos slightly more seriously. Just slightly

[oarsinsync]

The nice thing about drivers providing proof of your package being delivered somewhere that is not your home, is that you have proof that your package was not delivered to your home.

Them not taking the photo taking seriously works in your favour.

[m000]

And UPS is probalby to blame for that. AFAIK most delivery companies nowadays work their shifts with delivery quotas. I.e. the courier needs to deliver everything on the truck (which is typically more than you could deliver in a time-based shift) before calling it a day. Essentially, courier companies have found out that rather than scaling their workforce to the deliveries workload, it is more profitable to squeeze out a fixed number of employees to save wages, and occasionally apologize for the mixups caused by this situation.

[flumpcakes]

> which is typically more than you could deliver in a time-based shift

I think this compounds the issue: if people are committing fraud/lying (taking a picture of a random house as proof of 'sorry you were not in' or forging signatures themselves) because their slots are too full to deliver all packages they're supposed to then whomever is working in logistics won't see it. They will think all packages were at least attempted within that slot and as such not too onerous.

[m000]

I believe the results of this policy should have a measurable effect on the number of complaints/customer support cases and they are definitely taking notice of that.

But it's not that anyone will take action. This is exactly the expected outcome: Pay less for courier wages in USA/Europe, and keep the much cheaper (and probably outsourced) customer support hotline busy.

On the contrary, it would be more likely to take action if the complaints are not high enough. This means that they could squeeze the schedule of their couriers a bit more.

[flumpcakes]

I recently got my entire shipping costs refunded because I paid for next day delivery and the driver said they "missed me" and the proof was a photograph of a different address. I was surprised it was that easy to get the money back from the seller. I was incensed as I had spent the entire day waiting.

[alsetmusic]

I paid for next day before a long holiday weekend and got my (time sensitive) item five days later. I was unable to get a refund. Maybe I should have called again to speak to a different rep. This was UPS.

[actionfromafar]

Wonder if they are fooling themselves in the end though. It might look good on the KPI, but if it's based on fake data, the leaders are navigating blind.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Just got a new Mini, a couple of days ago.

Hereabouts, Apple uses UPS for deliveries.

They always require signature, and disallow “pre-signature.” I get a $30 cable; signature required. I get a $50 iPhone case; signature required. I get a $120 peripheral; signature required.

They left the $2,600 computer sitting on the doorstep (no signature required). Luckily, my daughter was paying attention, and immediately grabbed it, but we have had a problem, hereabouts, with highly aggressive porch pirates, that will actually go right into the house, to grab new deliveries.

I was pretty gobsmacked.

[kleiba]

I'm sure similar stories can be told for any country, but I've got to say that when I lived in Germany, I never had any trouble with deliveries. Maybe I just got lucky.

I did feel bad though for the people doing the deliveries, independent of what company they worked for. You can tell it's an awful job and they're working their butts off, sometimes delivering a package way after hours, like say after 9pm or so. I'm afraid it's like that pretty much in any country, though.

[socksy]

I think it’s highly dependent on both what kind of place you live and who the delivery driver is. At my place, I live in the Hinterhaus (which, annoyingly is where my buzzer is) up several flights of stairs with no elevator. Additionally, until recently the delivery driver for my street seemed to have some kind of agreement with someone about 10 houses away on the ground floor that would accept all the parcels for the entire street. They even had the gall to ask for donations for their “service” (all of the parcels I picked up from them reeked of smoke).

At my partner’s place, the delivery people are excellent, and we never miss a parcel. She has an elevator, in a different part of town, and there’s no Hinterhof. It’s very hit or miss.

[sgt]

Same in South Africa. Delivery services (like Courier Guy, Fedex, DHL, Fastway, RAM) are very good. They are fast, phone you if nobody opens up, and I have had zero issues in over a decade.

The country went a bit delivery crazy after COVID, so the competition is healthy.

[Aachen]

Might it also be that deliverers in SA expect it to get nicked if they just leave it at someone's front door? As compared to the deliverer in Sweden mentioned above

[thirdsun]

Also it's so complicated to have UPS leave your parcel at a place of your choice (carport, deck, porch, etc.) in case you aren't home.

They have their MyChoice service which you have to sign up for and wait for a confirmation that is sent to you by mail which might take several days. However even if you take these steps it turns out that they will only match your parcels if the sender uses exactly the same address as the one you provided them. One character off and you lose any ability to set how your parcel should be delivered.

Any other delivery service does that easily, without postal confirmation for a specific parcel or any upcoming shipments.

Since I'm at the office during the day I had situations were I simply couldn't receive a UPS parcel for several days because their MyChoice service is useless once the address matching fails.

[rkuska]

Similair stories with UPS in Czech republic. I stopped ordering from any site (including apple.com) that only uses UPS.

[Toutouxc]

Interesting, my user experience with them is top notch (Prague). MacBooks, iPads, musical instruments, mountain bikes, really expensive stuff generally. The delivery slot is kinda long ("in the afternoon"), but the tracking info is spot on, they always call and so far I have never lost anything with them.

[Aachen]

> The delivery slot is kinda long ("in the afternoon")

At least they tell you the day, not like in Germany. Gets put on the post today, then usually it either gets sorted overnight and delivered the next day, or there's another working day in between. The tracker used to say which it's gonna be after that overnight sorting (so if you check at 2am), but in the last year or so they've switched to telling you it's e.g. after the weekend some day and then surprise show up on Friday for example when you hadn't planned for anyone to be home, wasting the deliverer's time if you didn't decide to work from home that day spontaneously

[theshrike79]

My Apple Watch ended up in a store somewhere. It just happened to be in the same cart as their order and they took the whole cart.

Kinda wondered why my package showed up as "delivered" and it was signed by definitely NOT me.

That was a fun thing to unravel.

[vbezhenar]

Tell them you didn't receive macbook and get second one for free.

[ndsipa_pomu]

That's fraud.

[euroderf]

It's no better in Finland. UPS sucks here.