Courier Delivery Sucks

So the great and wonderful thing in lockdown at the moment is contactless delivery and having stuff shipped to you by a courier and it’s so wonderful – LOL. There are so many issues with courier delivery that people cannot be assured of being able to receive their package, although I have never lost a package, I know that there have been one or two close calls and that other people have lost packages due to courier services not being secure.

The first problem is the delivery options for many couriers are so limited, it’s a home address or a business address but not everyone has a business address so then they have to have it left at their residential address and these days there are plenty of reports where people have had the courier packages stolen soon after delivery to their residence.

You can have a package made signature only which means they aren’t supposed to deliver if they haven’t got someone to sign for the packages, but people have reported that drivers will just sign themselves for the package and no one can prove they did it unless you have a security camera that shows them leaving the package on the doorstep without getting it signed for. I had a package three years ago that was worth around $1000 but there was also the fact the items it contained were end of life stock and the new stock items were months away from being shipped so even if I could have proven the courier did not get a signature for it, which is pretty hard to do, it could have still been months before the contents could be replaced. The package was apparently delivered to a business premises at 7:30 am when there was no one there until 8:00 am or 8:30 am (they open at 9 am) so there was plenty of window where it could have been stolen as the front door is in full view of the street. In this instance the package was picked up by the staff when they arrived so I did receive it.

CourierPost is one of the rare few that have an option to send it to a Parcel Collect address which can be a local supermarket. But CourierPost have such great service at the moment that they are refusing to use this service at lockdown level 3 so then you are forced to use the less secure residential business or delivery options. See above.

The reality for me is more and more I will choose a click and collect option where I can travel to an address of the business that is sending the package and collect from there. It only takes me a short trip to get to the address to collect my package and they are liable for the goods until they actually collect.

This option doesn’t work obviously if the company is out of town and you have to use the courier. That is when having a courier delivery really sucks and it is not the great convenient thing that it is made out to be. It is certainly convenient for the business not to have to provide a local collection point where people can pick their goods up but not for the people buying.

This rant comes because as everyone knows there is increasing situations of courier packages being stolen from people’s houses where packages were delivered by a courier and it looks like once the package has been delivered at the address and signed off by the courier the recipient just has to wear the cost of losing the package.

I have been extremely blessed never to have had anything stolen or lost from a courier delivery but a part of this is I will always use the click and collect option and only deal with companies that give me this option. Of course what we really need is ParcelCollect type of services being more widely available for those times we deal with companies where courier is the only option.


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