Delivering the goods

In the finest seasonal tradition of ‘no room at the inn’, some late additions to our planned family gathering presented the prospect of three of the younger generation camping out in the dining room on the bare (and rather draughty) wooden floorboards. To avoid giving them an authentic Dickensian Christmas experience, possibly with authentic nineteenth-century ailments to follow, we ordered an inexpensive large rug online; it’s something I hardly ever do, but the lack of suitable local options and the impossibility of fitting the thing into the car left no alternative.

After some delays, the rug was due yesterday evening but the estimated time came and went with no sign of it; instead, we finally received a cheerful notification that it had been delivered half an hour earlier and signed for by ‘Sharon’ -  who? -  with an accompanying picture showing it standing in a puddle beside a completely unfamiliar front door. Fortunately a (somewhat grumpy) phone call to the delivery company elicited an apology and a promise to set things right and the rug finally turned up an hour or so later after its brief unscheduled sojourn in our nearest town.

The whole business left us with several unanswered questions, not least why Sharon, assuming she exists, happily signed for an 8x12ft rug she hadn’t ordered, but the most surprising thing was the matter-of-fact response on the part of Customer Services; their reaction suggested a practised routine for dealing with a common problem, like parcels lost in transit (or abandoned on the doorstep at the mercy of ‘porch pirates’) and the dreaded ‘sorry you were out’ card.32

Presumably this is, in part, the fault of a system in crisis, overloaded by the continuation of habits acquired in lockdown when rapid online delivery became a necessity for some and an indulgence for many. According to a study quoted in the Telegraph, deliveries run into the billions each year and roughly a third of all recipients across all the major companies in the sector experience a problem with the service (44% for evri). Given the working conditions, I suppose it’s hardly surprising:

…many drivers see part or all of their salaries made up of “pay-per-drop” fees – in some cases less than 50p per package – meaning they only get paid for a successful delivery. The structure potentially pushes drivers to dump packages or claim a delivery attempt was made, rather than trying again.

Did our driver, I wonder, decide that on a rainy Friday night he could not afford to make the time-consuming rush-hour drive out of town - the traffic is horrendous in the run-up to Christmas - and abandon the rug at an earlier stop in the hope that the company or its insurance would sort it out? And are customers really so accustomed to this kind of thing - or eager to have their goodies delivered to their door - that they are willing to put up with such abysmal failure rates on a regular basis?

And what will happen when, as is surely inevitable, the whole system finally breaks down and customers realise that the smaller shops which once fulfilled virtually every local need have vanished from Britain’s high streets, crippled by competition from the out-of-town retail giants and the internet and given the coup de grâce by Reeves’ budget plans?