The photo that UPS provided to prove that they delivered my package. I mean, sure, it’s my front porch, but they could have included the package.
The photo that UPS provided to prove that they delivered my package. I mean, sure, it’s my front porch, but they could have included the package.
Based on the number of photos people post on Nextdoor of their package at a totally different house, I’m not sure why these companies bother. Maybe they could train drivers to actually use their brains to see if they’re at the right place first.
They’d need to allow drivers to take enough time to appropriately do the job, so that’s never going to happen.
When you have to make as many deliveries in an hour to require breaking the sound barrier during your shift, you don’t have time to check house numbers.
Accurate. I get pissy about my deliveries (FedEx is notoriously bad here) but the truth of the matter is that the drivers are way overworked. They time shit down to the minute but assume traffic is constantly as good as the best days. So yeah, they build in time for bathroom breaks and to get everything where it goes as long as no one on the road has wrecked, is driving slow, and there are no construction zones gumming up the works. Then they penalize the drivers if everything isn’t done. So you end up with shit thrown over the fence, boxes that look like they were run over, misdelivered packages, and pictures of the corner of a porch.
I used to work for fedex. Most of the time those run over boxes were just crushed by the machine that handles them and sorts them, not always though… I worked with some daft people. Lots of my coworkers hated how prevalent door cams became but I loved them. Made it reeeall easy to call people out on their bullshit.
When there was a dispute things wound usually go like this ‘I delivered the package right at their front door, there’s a hallway cam, ask them to contact the manager and get footage of me not stopping by when I claimed I did.’ I never got into trouble in the years I did it because I always did my job right.
I don’t disagree. Ultimately it’s the fault of companies who expect drivers to do way too much to do it well. Having them waste time on a picture is incredibly stupid when a lot of times all it does is prove the delivered to the wrong place. It feels like the kind of thing thought up by upper management with no idea what the actual day to day of the job is like.
Actually I find the picture thing to be helpful. There’s a house on the next street over with the same house number and a similar street name, so we get packages misdelivered from time to time. If I see their porch in my delivery picture, I know where to go get it.
Just the other day, Doordash delivered somebody else’s Chipotle to my porch. Because the driver took a picture, I saw the actual customer walking by, comparing the photo on their phone to my house, and then coming up to get their burrito bowl.
And having the photo that their employee took of a house that’s obviously the wrong one has also been helpful in getting refunds before. Not me, but one of my friends; they had their package delivered to a house they didn’t even recognize, and the number on the door was clearly wrong, so the company refunded them.
So the photo thing I’m actually cool with. Yeah, it was probably originally conceived as a CYA for management, but it does actually turn out to help. I’d rather they give them time to be human beings while they’re doing deliveries; the photo thing isn’t really the big problem here.
The other thing is that a lot of the time when they take pictures it also tracks the photographs GPS location. Isn’t usually available to customers, although it would be helpful if they made it available to customers, but it does allow the support team to have some vague idea of where their driver has put it.
I’ve often thought that a good business would be a delivery company and your main gimmick is that you actually deliver the packages. I think they’ve missed out on an untapped market of actually doing the thing they claim to do.
Most of these package delivery companies hire people who would lose a battle of wits to their own reflection, pay them next to nothing, and give them 900 parcels to deliver in 45 minutes. Inevitably it leads to problems. My recommendation is that they don’t do any of that, and just hire more drivers. The increased business they would get by being reliable would offset the cost of having to hire more people.