Well, That’s Just Infuriating For Everyone Involved, Isn’t It?

We live up a long driveway in a rural area, a fair drive from a couple of tiny towns, so most of the time, mail orders are literally that — through the mail — and we collect them at the post office. There is one courier who drops packages off at a gas station only twenty minutes away, another courier that actually comes to the house (which I feel bad about as they usually get lost, and at best, it’s time-consuming), a few who decline to operate out here, and one that’s… just plain weird. Let’s call them [Courier].

The first time we had something coming with [Courier], I was watching the tracking closely, and to my frustration, I saw the package check in at a city five hours away and then stop. I Googled the business name mentioned as the last check-in spot and could find no record of it. I thought maybe it was a small local company that might do a loop only weekly or something, so I waited patiently.

When nothing came, I tried contacting [Courier], but searching their name brought up no contact information, only a million negative reviews and people raging that [Courier] was impossible to contact.

After two weeks of no tracking updates, I tried asking the seller for a replacement — sent with another company!

Maybe a week later, a stranger called me. It turned out she worked at a business in a town over an hour away — not the nearest town, by the way, but the fifth nearest, and very small, so we never go there — and my parcel had been sitting at their counter for weeks. She got tired of it being in the way, so finally actually looked at it and saw that my number was included on the label, and here she was calling. There was no explanation of why it was there or why she and her coworkers had not immediately either contacted the recipient or sent the package back.

Inconveniently, this business was inaccessible to me due to disability.

Me: “I’m not able to get the package. Could my partner come and get it for me?”

Employee: “No, we’ll only give it to you personally after seeing your ID.”

Tight security for an abandoned parcel! I had no choice but to tell her to return it to the sender, though I wished I could have saved the poor unwitting seller the hassle.

Even had I been able to collect it, I think it very strange that a courier who got paid to deliver a package would see fit to drop it miles away, forcing the recipient to do their work. And if they do this sort of thing, why not at least update the tracking with the package’s actual location and/or contact the recipient, so they know they are supposed to go to this location and get their parcel?

I have to wonder if this policy is why so many reviews complain about things never arriving. 

And I have to laugh at the bizarre fact that there is a “delivery company” which takes delivery jobs and charges delivery fees… but does not deliver.