PARCEL FARCE

Delivery drivers have gained a reputation for carelessness of late. Felicity Martin asks why, and what we can do about it

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Everyone either knows someone who's got a shocking parcel delivery story or has one themselves. Here's mine: I posted a valuable piece of collectable music merch via courier, who helpfully left the parcel out in the pouring rain. The contents got soaked and damaged in the process. My appeals to the delivery company's customer service department fell on deaf ears (not that I’m convinced I was even speaking to a human in the first place), and they offered zero compensation.

Other tales include packages being shunted into recycling wheelie bins (which are inevitably collected), stuffed under doormats, or flung over fences. Ellie, from Manchester, had one parcel left in her food waste bin – which contained food waste at the time. She can’t wear the contents, a sports bra, without remembering the smell as she fished out the package. Glasgow-based Harvey had a tablet delivered to his outdoor bin, which was described as a “safe space”. When he asked the delivery company why this was designated a secure spot, he was told: “Nobody goes looking in other people’s bins.”

“You know an industry’s in trouble if it passes the ‘Your mum, your mates’ test,” says consumer rights expert Martyn James. “If you ask, ‘Have you had a problem with a package delivery?’ Every single one of them, I guarantee you, will say yes, and then launch into a rant.” One woman he spoke to ordered £300 worth of rare books, which never arrived despite the company’s insistence they’d been delivered. Two months later, while pruning her wisteria, she found it had been lobbed on top of her garage.