OT - ping astravanman

Without trying to sound disrespectful to delivery drivers, I used to sort of be one, they can usually phone you, but won't because they "don't have time".

For hard to find/unfamiliar places I think it's sometimes easier for them to come back and find your house on a day when they aren't up to their eyeballs in before 10am deliveries and collections than phone you, turn round, arse about with directions and find your place eventually.

I'll try and keep this short, as I *could* waffle on about this for absolutely ages.

Here are a few points worth considering:

1. The backup drivers get from the depot is usually fairly limited regarding finding rural addresses if there isn't a contact phone number (and even if there is, if there's no answer, the driver probably simply won't bother trying). All they'll do is look on something like multimap (see point 2), or make a lame half-hearted attempt at contacting the customer who sent it out, in order to get something like a contact phone number for the recipient (see point 3).
2. In many rural areas there are between 20 and 40 houses, all with names, sharing the one unique postcodes. Often these are spread over best part of a mile's length of road, so in a lot of cases locating the centre of the postcode on something like multimap is absolutely useless, unless you happen to live very close to that centre point.
3. Quite often, the areas where being able to use a mobile phone to call the recipient is most likely to be required coincide with the areas where the signal is at its most s**te. A lot of drivers won't have the foresight to call someone while they're actually in an area where the signal is good, so will just use that as an excuse not to bother.
4. The data/software is out there to make finding such addresses extremely easy, as the Ordnance Survey have compiled a very thorough database called AddressPoint (part of OS MasterMap), pinpointing each and every one of the 27 million or so addresses in the country - it's an extremely well-thought-out system, and the latest version even includes alias information, mentioning previous names where a house has changed name in the past. The data is very expensive, but IMHO worth spending the money on from the point of view of running a large parcel company. Unfortunately they probably don't see it like this, as there are relatively few rural deliveries compared to the "more important" easy-to-find urban deliveries (see point 5).
5. This is an extremely short sighted way of looking at it though, as being able to pinpoint exactly where every single address is would mean that such addresses have *far* less of a knock-on effect on the amount of other deliveries that one driver can make (even if the driver spends the bare minimum of a couple of minutes driving slowly looking for a house before giving up, it soon adds up), and ultimately means they'll make less profit as it reduces the number of deliveries any one driver can make.

Now obviously by using dedicated subbies on a drop rate it won't affect them one bit, so they just pass the buck onto the driver and it's somebody else's problem, but if they used their brains for one minute they'd realise that it still costs them more money (and therefore makes them less) however way you look at it, as they'll hardly ever be using

100% their own owner drivers - there are nearly always a few vans every day in most operations like this that are external couriers who charge a flat daily rate, and will rarely be anywhere near as productive as the regular drivers, due to not being as familiar with the type of work (it's not rocket science, but it does require a reasonable element of clue) or the areas involved, so it's ultimately still costing the parcel company more money. If they invested in such data and provided a facility for the drivers to check out unfamiliar addresses then the problem would be 99.99% solved, and ultimately the drivers would be more productive, and the companies would make more profits.

It's unrealistic to expect owner drivers themselves to invest in such data, as there are certain minimum spend requirements, and most would consider it not worthwhile, but if the fuckwitted 'management' of such companies actually thought it through, they'd actually realise that it would be worth investing the money in it, and would save them a lot of money in terms of extra time spent chasing up contact phone numbers etc, for these addresses.

Have a look at

to see the data in action, and just how easy it is to locate an individual house very specifically. It costs money - 99p+VAT to view and scroll within a limited area of 6 hectares IIRC, but you can register and top up by card with as little as the minimum £1.17 required, and it's a good demonstration of exactly what the parcel companies should be investing money into. Obviously parcel companies wouldn't bother using a service like this, as it'd get very expensive (and at the end of the day that's how emapsite.com make a profit), but the data's available to buy in bulk for unlimited use, and would (as I may have mentioned) be a very worthwhile investment in so many respects for such companies.

Ta for that. In this case, the postcode is pretty good - it isn't spread out. And I think most mobiles work here. But I think your points about not being bothered to spend the money on a proper database are key - at the end of the day, Amtrak probably don't give a f*ck about a couple of missed rural deliveries - they probably don't have a sufficient financial incentive to try. And the people my parcel was coming from also don't care - my order is a sufficiently small part of their turnover that there's no point in them hassling Amtrak. Oh well, I'll remember not to use them for time-critical stuff in the future.

cheers, clive

Well, in some respects. But if they took the view that not needing to waste even a small amount of time on each rural delivery would actually increase productivity in the other more profitable areas (business parks, town centres, etc etc.), then they'd still be better off for using it.

That's the problem. A lot of people are too shortsighted to see any point in caring about the less profitable areas of any business. Which is bollocks really. It all has an effect on their business as a whole. If word gets around about treating you well and given you a fast efficient service as a small individual customer, then word gets around, and hundreds (possibly thousands) more small individual customers follow suit, which, overall, is worth a lot to their business. Similar with courier companies - if they invest in the right data/software deal with rural deliveries more efficiently, then less time (both in terms of office staff, and driver time) gets wasted sorting them out, meaning that they'll have more time left to chase new business (for the office/sales staff), and to manage more deliveries in any given amount of time (where the drivers are concerned). Makes sense to me.

Thing is - they're all the same, to be honest. I don't know of a single one that's bothered to invest in such products. A lot of them (particularly the ones that use owner drivers) rely on a driver knowing the area well and knowing most of the places, but it's not a sustainable solution - if a driver leaves, no amount of training could replace the local knowledge that driver had accumulated over the years/months they'd been doing that area. Investing in the right products would solve that problem, but they quite simply can't be arsed with it.

Oh yes, I agree entirely. The 80/20 rule isn't necessarily one to follow. There's an example in plumbing shops I believe - while many trim their stock to the most popular lines, reasoning that that's where the majority of their money comes in and they can make huge savings in stock/display/etc, there are ones which are very successful because they sell everything - people go there because they know they'll get what they want and not have a wasted trip.

cheers, clive

Why post it?

Coz the person I wanted to speak to hangs around here. Ok, I could magically ask him to pop over to uk.whinge.about.crap.courier.companies, but it's far easier just to post here.

clive

Our postcode is in TomTom but our built-6-years-ago road isn't - I'm now on first name terms with most of the local couriers.

Like I said though, for a lot of rural addresses being able to locate to a full postcode is nowhere near enough. It amazes me that it's only within the last couple of years that most of the systems now come with a "full postcode search facility", when that's only something that the likes of multimap have been doing for years anyway, and they should really be looking at the next level (individual addresses - known as premise level) now.