How many of you use Amazon and get notices that your products have been delivered when this is not so? Well, I'm tired of these presumptive notifications from vendors, as false positives cause a lot of grief when deliveries are time-sensitive.
Years ago, I subscribed to Amazon Prime because they advertised 2-day delivery for most products. This was very important, as Amazon was the only place where I could find a girl's locking diary that I could give to a young girl before Christmas. Today, things are different. On Amazon's site, they tell users to do the following:
1 - Confirm shipping address in Your Orders
2 - Look for a notice of delivery attempt
3 - Check around the delivery location
4 - Ask your household members and neighbors
5 - Wait 48 hours for the package to be delivered
6 - You can check with the carrier
You'd think that Amazon (and its carriers) could always take a photograph of the delivered object where it was delivered, and include that photo as part of an email confirming delivery. This was helpful to RQS when her package was delivered to the building next door, and made it to her place a day later. But false positives can cause big problems.
Quite often, I get false positives from Amazon and UPS regarding product deliveries. The worst of these occurred a while back when UPS and I got our signals cross when I ordered a phone from Motorola. The confusion had me going back and forth between UPS and Motorola trying to find out where the product was delivered and how to get a replacement shipped to me. I ended up paying the first month's installment on the phone before I actually received it. Although Amazon can be bad, but UPS can be worse because they consider a product to be delivered - even when they hand it off to the post office for last-mile delivery. This happens quite a bit for many small items, and no notice is available on UPS's site to tell the recipient that they handed off the delivery to USPS.
Shortly before the pandemic and during part of it, I was a customer of Freshly. Their food was good, but their last mile delivery was terrible. Out of 13 shipments, only 3 or 4 were delivered correctly. My boxes were left behind entry doors where I couldn't see them, left in other doorways where no one cared about them, and in one case, left in front of a vacant apartment where the food was left to rot for a week. Although I got reimbursed for my losses, I got annoyed at the last mile delivery service they used - LaserShip. Like many "Gig Economy" services, LaserShip bid out its deliveries to the lowest bidder, and this often meant that products were delivered incorrectly, if at all. I'll bet that firms like this were the cause of Freshly's demise.
What in the world should we do as consumers? For me, I'd report the products as missing as soon as they are marked as delivered and found not to be so. Someone has to pay the cost for false deliveries and businesses have more clout than consumers to insure that their products get delivered properly. So, make them pay the cost for the problems they created until these problems are fixed.
