[ShakataGaNai]

I've run into the "falsely marked as delivered" thing a few times (at home, wfh). Last time I called and threw a shit fit and the rep gave me the usual run around about "how you must have simply missed the delivery" or "maybe you didn't hear the doorbell" or whatever BS. I basically said "Look, I've got a security camera on my front door. I've pulled the video at the timestamp saying I'm not home. The truck isn't even on my street, let alone at my door. What's your email address and I'll send it to you?"

They always demure saying it isn't necessary, they can't accept it, yada yada. And somehow always insist that they can't get ahold of the local distro manager, and just to wait until tomorrow (in this case this was "Attempt" 2 of 3, both of which were a lie). I had to upgrade to the nuclear response "I'm going to send this video to the corporation who sent me the item to show them that FedEx is actively lying on their delivery statuses. And I'll CC our local news team who's bored and happy to burn down corporations because they've got nothing else going on." Turns out they actually CAN get a message to the local distribution manager (no shit, I know that) who CAN call me to apologize and the truck magically finds its way to my house by the end of the day.

I'm not sure who to be ticked with or feel bad for. The drivers are typically the ones being abused, so I sort of feel bad for them. But also... stop freaking lying. Don't say you tried when you did. It wasn't even something that required signature. All you had to do was to walk the 15 steps from the truck, chuck it as hard as you can towards my porch (because... of course they do), and call it a day.

[bombcar]

Part of it is (sometimes) employees working "off the clock" where they'll mark a bunch of shit delivered, and then come back later when they're not "paid" and deliver them - because it prevents overtime and they still meet their targets.

[Greed]

Why do they do that? Are they penalized for working overtime too often?

[bombcar]

Yes. The shipper (the smaller local organization that FedEx or Amazon contracts with) turns around and hires drivers. FedEx pays the contract company per piece, the company turns around and pays the drivers per hour.

FedEx has some mystical software that helps them gauge how many employees per delivery, etc they need, but that stuff always leans toward "perfect scenarios". End result is the driver is asked to be perfect or more than perfect, never break any laws, never get delayed by ringing doorbells, etc, and still get all the deliveries done.

One easy way out for the driver is to mark everything in the computer as it is supposed to be, and then go back and fix it later (which eventually doesn't happen - there are stories about it).

UPS has something similar, but the drivers get paid overtime and are more unionized (protected) but even THEY will pull the above bullshit because there are often federal laws about truck drivers that they're skirting around.

I've seen my normal UPS driver stop by my house past 10PM near Christmas, dressed in normal street clothes and in his minivan with family, to drop off ap package that had been marked as delivered earlier in the day.

The above is why more and more of the systems require the driver to take a picture of the delivery, which of course adds time, and slows things down ...

[Spooky23]

They work for contractors -- alot of the companies that used to do stuff like newspaper and courier delivery got into this, but it varies dramatically be region.

For the lousy contractors, it's sort of an uncanny valley between UPS and a crowdsourced model like DoorDash or Laser. The employees are sketch. At work, i used them to ship WFH user equipment -- they'd do shit like deliver laptops to dumpsters at apartment complexes (complete with pictures). In NYC, the couriers park on a side street, stack packages on the street and have casual labor deliver them.

I've also had bad experiences with dropboxes where the couriers pilfer high value items - return iphones in particular. They get misdelivered to incorrect addresses on purpose.

[bdcravens]

My boss actually caught them lying one time on camera. They're incentivized to lie, since a late delivery is entitled to a full refund (for the shipper) and loss of revenue.

(I work for Refund Retriever; we audit for late deliveries for Fedex/UPS)