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Big issues with Hermes deliveries, anyone?


spruecutter96

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I have been waiting on two E-Bay purchases to arrive via Hermes for more than two weeks now. When I checked the tracking-system, it read "Delayed by a major event".... whatever that means. They don't appear to have moved an inch, if you can believe the tracking. I have a suspicion they've managed to lose them both.  

 

Has anyone else had issues with Hermes recently? I read on-line that they've been using this "major event" excuse since June! This would suggest that the current situation is not caused by the pre- pre-Christmas rush. 

 

Cheers. 

 

Chris. 

 

 

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At Hermes, a major event may include any of the following:

 

- Delivering a parcel to the correct address rather than a house in a different street

- Not leaving it on the doorstep in the rain without ringing or knocking

- Turning up by the promised day rather than a week after the item was replaced

- Driving up to the gate and actually using the intercom rather than just turning around and disappearing

- An office party to celebrate the occurrence of any of the above phenomena

Edited by Ade H
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And as you can probably tell, all of the above has a basis in experience. Apart from the office party, which is just a guess.

 

  

2 minutes ago, lasermonkey said:

I’ve been lucky enough to have a good local delivery lady. 


I think that it's very dependent on that variability.

Edited by Ade H
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3 minutes ago, Ade H said:

And as you can probably tell, all of the above has a basis in experience. Apart from the office party, which is just a guess.

 

  


I think that it's very dependent on that variability.

It wasn’t like this last year though. I ordered a couple of Airfix B-17s from The Works and Hermes were the courier. After weeks of not showing, the kits suddenly appeared on my doorstep, though to this day they’re showing as due last November on the Hermes website! I don’t think they were ever scanned. 

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Hermes are mostly poor in my experience although I have sent inexpensive/worthless stuff via them as they are the cheapest, but you do get what you pay for. 

 

The modelling table I ordered via Amazon was supposed to take a couple of days, it actually took two weeks!

 

Their tracking site is not a lot of use either, my table was recorded as being lost, Amazon refunded me, then it turned up two weeks later.

 

Bit of a shambles really but OK for inexpensive stuff.

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Never had a problem with Hermes round here. Though have had problems with RM recently, parcel never made it so had to get a refund, and another is currently late (and the tracking suggests it’s either not been collected by/dropped off to RM or it wasn’t scanned properly and been lost in the system, so come next week that might be another refund to chase up. 

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I had a similar Hermes experience with some cocoa powder I ordered (for hot chocolate, honest). Major incident, late arrival, damaged packaging has caused some product to leak. I made a complaint, heard nothing.

 

But then I once worked in a warehouse where the nightshift would play cricket with whatever came to hand and had a TV hidden in a crate. Until a director drove by one night and the lights were on so he could see in.

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Not used them recently but I've never had issues with Hermes on the handful of parcels I used them for circa. 2017-2019.  Had a recent problem with a lazy Royal Mail post person though...

 

You hear all these anecdotes, but in the grand scheme of things they aren't much.  Hermes is no worse or better than any other delivery company out there.

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58 minutes ago, RobL said:

Hermes is no worse or better than any other delivery company out there.

I'm sorry, but that is fundamentally untrue, from where I'm sitting. I have read dozens of stories about just how poor they can be. My cousin had a brand-new DSLR camera dropped over a six-foot gate by a Hermes courier (lucky, it was not damaged, but it could have been very different).

 

When you consider that Hermes couriers are paid a maximum of 70 pence for making a delivery, regardless of what's involved, do they really have any incentive to do a good job?  

 

All parcel-services "lose" some deliveries (Royal Mail included) - that's an unfortunate fact-of-life. Hermes seem to make it into an art-form.  

 

Chris. 

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I try to avoid them as much as avoiding the plague......

 

Sadly, I sometimes do not have the option of using another courier and this is the result:-

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Thankfully on this occasion there was no damage to the contents. I had a previous delivery from Airfix of a 1/24 Typhoon (the recent Airfix Members club deal) and sadly it only gave the option of standard delivery (which is Hermes), Express is via DPD. That arrived in a slightly worse condition. I sent pictures, and a complaint along to Airfix, my words to them were, and I quote, "looked like the depot staff had been emulating the England football team, and had been using my delivery as a football! 

 

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Was using Hermes around this time last year for sending stuff around the family and was on some occasions having deliveries made within twenty-four hours of handing in at the local parcel drop.

 

Early this year started getting demands from them for excess charges on an item which had been sent and they were declining to deliver until these were paid  - demand included correct parcel number , my name and address and those of the recipient - checked with the recipient and they had safely received the item , checked with Hermes and they confirmed that the demand was not from them but could/would not explain how a third party could have obtained the information so have not used them again since.

 

Still recieve items delivered by them but delivery times have grown during the year with some items taking several days from reported dispatch by sender to being shown as received by Hermes to then  arriving at one of their facilities and then remaining there for up to a week before being on the move again.

 

To be fair I have some items travelling by Royal Mail which show similar delays during the same period so maybe not circumstances unique to any specific carrier.

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4 hours ago, spruecutter96 said:

I'm sorry, but that is fundamentally untrue, from where I'm sitting. I have read dozens of stories about just how poor they can be. My cousin had a brand-new DSLR camera dropped over a six-foot gate by a Hermes courier (lucky, it was not damaged, but it could have been very different).

 

When you consider that Hermes couriers are paid a maximum of 70 pence for making a delivery, regardless of what's involved, do they really have any incentive to do a good job?  

 

All parcel-services "lose" some deliveries (Royal Mail included) - that's an unfortunate fact-of-life. Hermes seem to make it into an art-form.  

 

Chris. 

 


With all respect, there are dozens of stories about all carriers, don't be fooled into believing all of them though as there are people out there with axes to grind that will post anything online.

 

I'm not standing up for Hermes in any way, but to think they are any worse than any other courier is folly.

 

Royal Mail for example recently left two packages that needed to be signed for on my front path in plain view for anyone to come along and nick.  I had a courier, not Hermes or Royal Mail, leave an item inside my back yard's gate in the last few months.  No indication to me that they had been and delivered the item, it could have been there for days had I not gone looking for it.

 

But that's just my experiences of Royal Mail, and whoever that other carrier was (I don't recall the name, it wasn't one of the usuals, i.e. not Hermes, RM, Fedex, UPS, DHL etc.), the above is just my anecdotal evidence though (meaning it's not really evidence of anything other than my own experience) - others may find they have no problems with the same carriers.

 

You have to take all these anecdotes, then realise the millions (billions?) of deliveries these companies make, and then draw your own conclusions based on the sheer volume of successful deliveries vs the handful of bad deliveries.

 

Personally I'd rather people didn't send me anything via Royal Mail at the moment, because I know we have some downright ignorant temporary posties on the route I'm on that are afraid of a 6" tall 1" thick makeshift flood defence and a little bit of mud that collected at my front doorstep the last time we had a heavy rain flood the other week prior to putting in the makeshift defences.

 

But then I also know the usual postie is a very good egg and goes out of his way to be helpful...

Edited by RobL
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Hi, Robl. 

 

I take your point - I guess everyone has bad experiences of all the companies that they can relate. 

 

I have found very delicate parcels sitting on my kitchen window-ledge - could have been blown on to the patio by a good wind. I've found pacels in my back-garden with two inches of snow on them (when I was away from my house for several days). I've found stuff sitting on my front-door mat, where they could easily be seen from the road.   

 

I'm very blessed by a RM postie who actually gives a damn about his job. He makes sure I know when he's made a delivery. 

 

Hermes were featured on a Channel 4 consumer-rights show last year. They had failed to deliver a parcel and it turned up in a Birmingham auction-house as "lost property" less than a month later. It still had the original addressee's details on the front. What a shame that Hermes couldn't be bothered to match the consignment number to the sender? This is why it is very important to write the "sender" return address clearly on the exterior of anything you send. Not doing so just gives these companies the excuse not to send them back to you, if they failed to get to their intended destination. 

 

Cheers.

 

Chris.   

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I think it's astonishing how good all of the parcel delivery services are. Almost all of my many parcels arrive on time and very quickly, heralded by (unnecessary to me) email and messages, undamaged and for very reasonable charges. When I think how many parcels are in transit at any time and how we are able to track so many of them I'm just astounded. I recall the old days of the Post Office monopoly and celebrate what we have now.

 

I even feel slightly guilty knowing how little the drivers get paid and the huge amount of drops they have to make, and go out of my way to be nice to them whenever I can get to meet them at the door. 

 

It's good for me to look on the bright side. I keep slightly more cheerful as a result of cultivating this attitude.

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For some time I had no trouble at all from Hermes, but the last three deliveries have all lacked information that they were to take part.  One ended up on the doorstep overnight, one disappeared into oblivion, and the other one was collected after a knock on the door.  I have an open enquiry about the missing one, but nothing other than formula emails.  Fortunately the sender (Postscript) is sending a replacement set of books.  presumably by Hermes...

 

I never had any problems with  the Post Office monopoly, finding the service excellent and at least they paid their employees a decent wage.  You didn't have to stay in all day just in case, and they had local contact offices pretty well everywhere if they did have to leave a note for you to collect it.  If you were getting parcels from more than one source they were delivered together.  We could do with such a service now.

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I've had poor experience with Hermes going back years. I avoid using them if at all possible - and haven't used them at all for the last year or so.

 

None the less I still get notifications (once a month or so) about a parcel which is going to be delivered. No parcel arrives, but it does make you wonder about their IT systems.

 

Cheers

 

Colin

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17 hours ago, Bertie Psmith said:

I even feel slightly guilty knowing how little the drivers get paid and the huge amount of drops they have to make,

Exactly! It's peanuts. I've done multi drop jobs and to be perfectly honest, IMO, it should change as it's unsafe. These drivers are regularly breaking traffic laws to get the job done, and it's the same over here. White van man often goes through our village at something like 50mph (there's a 50kph limit). Regular drivers usually have their own route, so they know all of the drops, but because the wages are so low, a lot of the time these companies use agency drivers who have no knowledge of the route/drops. The only time that I did this work, I took 25% of the stuff back to the yard, undelivered. To say that they weren't best pleased is an understatement. I was asked not to come back, to which I replied that I had no intentions of ever coming back. The stress of that job was unbelievable.

 

John.

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1 hour ago, Bullbasket said:

The stress of that job was unbelievable.

 

A good friend of mine spent a few weeks working for Hermes in November and December last year. Said it was a genuinely HORRIBLE job and one he would never go back to. If he'd done five hundred "drops" a day, they would have expected one-thousand. All the drivers had to drive at very dangerous speeds in heavily-populated areas, just to make their quota. The couriers do the best job they can, I'm sure, and are paid peanuts for their efforts. 

 

Chris. 

 

    

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I interviewed for a job with one of these companies once. They wouldn't even tell me who they were until I'd signed a non-disclosure agreement about the terms and conditions they would be offering. I declined to sign and that was the end of that. All very dodgy. Many of the guys and gals who deliver to me have little English too, which must make things even worse for them. And still most of the parcels arrive in hours, when I would be happy with weeks. I've never needed an emergency model kit.

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