… unlike any French courier, since they are unable to deliver anything on time. It doesn’t even matter which one it is, you’re not getting that parcel on time. I could become famous and create a website where people log their incidents with French courier services but with the French love of complaining I wouldn’t have enough bandwidth for it. It’s that bad.
But why am I writing about this today? Well, once again, it happened. I was expecting an ANT+ USB stick that I ordered on the past Wednesday. I’m a member of Amazon Premium (because things in France cannot have the same name as elsewhere) and I should have gotten that after one day. I ordered it late, so it was supposed to arrive on Friday. The only thing that arrived on Friday was a triage error and a promise to deliver it on the next working day. And here we are, and nothing was delivered.
This is such a common situation here that on Amazon you even have a feature to tell them that you didn’t get your delivery and claim a refund or ask them to send it again. Perhaps you’ll get lucky and get a less bad one next time.
But this was just the latest one. The first one with TNT. But it doesn’t even matter, my experience with UPS is exactly the same. Late deliveries or, even better, waiting an entire day for them to deliver it and they decide to just drop it on the closest relay point. Which is the swimming pool shop in the middle of nowhere with no public transportation available (because everybody must have a car).
If there’s one thing that never happens with a French courier is having them knocking at your door. If it fits in the mailbox, its going there. Does it require your signature? No problem, the mailman will sign it for you (yes, it also happened, this one with Chronopost). It doesn’t fit? To the relay point it is.
Chronopost and Colissimo (a service by La Poste) love to use the post office as the relay point. Post office which closes at 6PM. Perfect time for those of us which, unlike the French delivery personnel, work.
I think I never received a parcel shipped by any company of the La Post Groupe on time. Chronopost used to be delayed. My best experience with them was when they scheduled a delivery on a Saturday, didn’t deliver it, updated the tracking on Monday to delivered on Saturday and then delivered it on Wednesday. This is also something that is quite usual. But now they deliver it before, which can be quite convenient.
But, surprisingly, even if you don’t rely on their (courier) services to ship your stuff, the same will happen. I had friends that stayed home for a full day and nothing. I also went home one day to be told that they would deliver it the next one because the van broke (I’m not kidding). And this was told on the next day, half an hour before they delivered the parcel (good thing I work 10 minutes from home).
And, because this is already becoming to big, I’ll share my absolute favourites. The first one was a delivery to one of my friends that wasn’t delivered because there were road works and they didn’t want to find the detour. The second was a set of four car tyres that were left, literally, under the doormat (once again, I’m not kidding).
I once thought that there couldn’t be anything worse than MRW in Lisbon. Life proved how wrong I was by sending my to delivery hell.
Afonso Garcia 