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by m000 588 days ago
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.
2 comments

> 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.

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.

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.
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.
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.