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Having returned some outdoor gear to an online retailer it kept showing on their website as 'awaiting your return'. After the prescribed number of days I emailed them and they declared it lost, authorised my immediate refund and said that they'd make claim with Royal Mail.
Considering there was north of 600 quid's worth of stuff, what the hell happened to it? It seemed as though it just didn't make it out of the RM system! Retailer didn't batt an eyelid!
So who has my parcel!!?? And what would happen if it were found - would it work its way to the retailer or just auctioned or such like? RM staff can't just half inch stuff can they - surely they'd be traced?
There must be hundreds a day just floating in the system!
In my experience as an online retailer, about half eventually turn up at some point. Others probably have a damaged or lost label and go into a big pile of lost property at the courier, and the rest are nicked.
What I don’t know is what happens to orders sent to Mexico. I have never had a successful delivery there, so have excluded it as a country to which we deliver. I assume there’s some thieving **** somewhere over there sitting on a massive pile of things he can never use or even sell.
JP
One time we had a customer call up to pay for an item they had received about a year after ordering. We'd already sent them a replacement but they told me their postie had been taking parcels, eventually got caught, and they found a massive stash of unopened parcels at his home. These were delivered with an apology and the customer thought the decent thing to do was to pay for it. I Googled it and there was a news article about it.
About half of 'lost' parcels eventually turn up, the other half who knows? Nicked or the received by customers who treat it as a freebie and don't bother telling us. Personally I'd prefer Royal Mail to return badly delayed parcels as we've usually resent or refunded by that point.
Packages delivered to bins, left in rain, we've had it all - pallets nicked in transit, perps were caught and jailed for that one - but the one that still hurts is Turkish customs blocking a delivery and coming up with a charge way in excess of the item cost to return it, so we just had to write it off.
As far as I know their undelivered stuff ends up over in Ireland. Illegible address, missing label, separated parcels etc. all in a warehouse over there. I've had a couple of instances where I've been in touch and they've asked for a physical description, gone looking and found what's been missing. Really good service and attitude once you get as far as speaking to the department involved and that's why I use them rather than Herpes and the like. Similarly lost parcels are just met with a shoulder shrug and a real battle for any recompense.
From personal experience (and no I don't work for them, I've just seen the photos) a huge amount just goes 'missing' from Amazon before it even gets on a lorry. We're talking pallets not parcels, and this includes top end trainers and countless iPhones/smartphones.
I can't believe how lapse the security must be as this must be happening on a massive scale. I'm presuming it's just swallowed up due to the huge amounts they have going out every day.
Read "The Great and Secret Show" by Clive Barker. It'll answer your questions.
I had a Blackspire 44T chainring disappear in the last 2 weeks.
I'd love to know where it is, i can't imagine many people want or need it... especially the postie.
Auctioned off if no sender/recipient info with item, or incinerated, I believe.
Chances are it's simply delayed in the system, RM are not operating their normal levels of track and trace, at least at the delivery depot (so recipient isn't likely to receive a "ready for deliver today" notification). Parcel levels are higher than Xmas currently, only there's also a lot of COVID-19 related absenses plus two posties can no longer use the vans together like they have in recent years.
A while back I ordered a carbon tube from ebay for a few quid, about a month later I told the seller that it hadn't arrived and they refunded me. 3 months down the line I received an empty bag through the door with a note from RM saying that the contents may have been damaged or lost, there was a carbon tube sized hole in the corner of the bag so I suppose it escaped somehow.
I still wonder what journey that empty bag went on...
IIRC they go around in ever more ludicrous circles on some weird island before all ending in up in a church, or was it an airport lounge, and realising they'd never been sent in the first place or that if they had been sent they'd been destroyed after all. Except those going to the USA Zip code 4-8-15-16-23-42.
Years ago I sold a saddle on the classifieds here, and posted it off in an old CRC jiffy bag. After about a week, it hadn't arrived, so I think I ended up refunding whoever had bought it (it was only about a tenner I think).
About a week after that, I got a call from CRC, from a very confused chap who was wondering why I'd posted back an old saddle 🙂 Turns out the address label I'd put on had fallen off and it looks like the Royal Mail had gone off the 'if undelivered return to CRC<address>' label that was originally on it. CRC fella tracked me down from the original order number.
Anyway, CRC chap was good enough to repackage it and send it to the fella I'd originally sold it to, who was good enough to send me the money again 🙂
That's what you want to read at this time of doom and gloom,a wee bit like at the end of the ten o'clock news with Anna Ford smiling away at Reginald Bosanquet
I sent my Chas Roberts frame to Croydon in the nineties for a paint job and service via parcel force luckily insured it got £400 quid eventually and then it appeared in the Croydon depot just lying at the back unharmed so a win win for me new paint job, Pace forks and delivery for free
I once had a RM ‘parcel not delivered’ note through the door, so went to the sorting office, and they couldn’t find any parcel. I was given a claim form, trouble was, I wasn’t expecting a parcel, had no idea who the parcel I wasn’t expecting was from, what it might be, or what it’s value might theoretically could have been.
Never heard anything more, the sorting office changed location some time after, so if anything had been lurking in a corner it never found its way to me.
It’s threads like this remind me of it, and I do wonder just what the chuffing heck it might have been!
Or where it went.
Yup, somewhere out there is a warehouse where all your dreams can become a reality.
A mate is temping at a sorting office. Here's what the dock looked like last Friday:
Some numpty at my work wrote USA instead of Australia on a package that we sent out. We could watch it on the tracking going round and round 6 depots in the USA. We got bored of watching it after 2 months. It's probably still there.
Illegible address, missing label, separated parcels etc. all in a warehouse over there. I’ve had a couple of instances where I’ve been in touch and they’ve asked for a physical description, gone looking and found what’s been missing. Really good service and attitude once you get as far as speaking to the department involved
I've gone through that process as well, I've no idea how they do it as there must be thousands of parcels to sort through!
I actually sent them a photo of the box as we had a spate of them going "missing" (selling old IT kit on ebay) so had started photographing every package as it went out the door. the buyer had given us the address of the building but it was a big office block so they'd turned it away as there was no way of knowing which office it was for.
I had a Blackspire 44T chainring disappear in the last 2 weeks.
I’d love to know where it is, i can’t imagine many people want or need it… especially the postie.
Maybe, but it's probably got a note/receipt in with it giving the retail value of the thing. All any would be parcel thief needs to do is sit on it for a few months and then gumtree/ebay/FB buy&sell it off for 50% of the retail price they never paid...
I doubt many questions are asked over the provenance of most "Like new" items worth under ~£100, do it a few times and you've doubled your income from Yodel...