It's all in the delivery

Continuing on the theme of what's really good about home shopping....

.....The right products seem to get onto the delivery vehicles faster and more reliably too. When did you last have to wait 28 days for a delivery for a fairly standard item? And lots of the delivery drivers are kitted out with sexy GPS handheld navigational, database tea-making gizmos (without which they cease to function I believe) that take them right to your doorstep - providing you have keyed in the postcode correctly.

There’s just the small matter of finally getting the parcels into the hands of people like me – the customer. As far as I can tell nothing has changed much in this field since, oh probably the moment when some genius had the idea of cutting a hole in a front door, putting a flap across it so that anybody who dared to use it had the skin stripped from their knuckles and then calling it a letter box. Apparently, this was something that homeowners were encouraged by the Royal Mail to provide from 1849 (thanks to Paul of www.wicks.org/pulp/part1.html for that little gem). But the problem is that I’m not always at home when the parcel man calls and anything bigger than a couple of DVDs won’t fit through your average letter box.

So everything to help me shop from home has rapidly progressed, except for the final step. Here’s where it gets interesting.

I’m going to post some of my delivery experiences; the good, the bad and the comical. And I’d like anybody who is interested to add his or her experiences too. But rather than just a collection of gripes, why don’t we try and be constructive too? If a delivery driver or company has gone out of their way to get the job done, used a bit of initiative or whatever, then let’s celebrate that and give him/her a mention.

If a retailer has been particularly attentive in providing a service then we should give them a mention too.