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How to unleash your anger over poor German package delivery

Left seething by an important package that went undelivered despite you staying home? You're far from the only one, but help is at hand.

Published: 12 December 2016 13:12 CET
How to unleash your anger over poor German package delivery
Photo: DPA

If you work in an office with a door onto the street in a German city, you might well feel like you are a post office first, and a news site for expats in Germany second. Not that we’re speaking from personal experience or anything.

On an almost hourly basis, delivery men for private postal services probably knock, asking you to take a package for a neighbour who doesn’t happen to be at home.

Well, it seems like some of these delivery men are cutting corners.

A website set up a year ago by the Consumer Rights Centre (Verbraucherzentrale) called Paket-Ärger (package anger) has already received over 6,000 complaints.

“Consumers are always complaining to us about negative experiences with private delivery services,” the organization explains on the website. 

“Damaged packages, late deliveries, packages left in the hallway, or an ‘unable to deliver’ slip left in the postbox despite someone being home – these are just a few of the complaints we receive.” 

Many enraged individuals complain that they waited the entire day for the doorbell to ring, only to find a note in their letterbox telling them the package couldn’t be delivered as there was nobody home.

In one case – the complaint of the month in October – a customer called Max found that his purchase had not been delivered by DHL although he was at home.

When he turned up at the DHL office, they told him they could not hand over his package because the name on his ID card was Maximilian not Max.

After he returned with a letter he wrote 'from Max', giving Maximilian permission to pick up his package, the DHL employee said that he could not accept the letter as he knew that Max did not exist but was in fact Maximilian. The package therefore remained undelivered.

DHL responded by saying that they weren’t aware of the case.

Another angry customer reported that a delivery man rang the doorbell, but when no one responded, instead of dropping it off at a neighbour he threw it over a two-metre fence into the courtyard.

The Consumer Rights Centre encourages people to complain through their website so that a detailed, independent overview of the botched jobs of delivery services can be produced. In some cases the organization might even consider legal action.

It also points out that all complaints are anonymized.

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Can you rely on Sweden’s Postnord to deliver cards and presents on time?

Wednesday marks the last day you can send first class letters or parcels in Sweden and still hope they'll make it in time for Christmas Eve. But how reliable is PostNord, the company which runs Sweden's postal service?

Published: 20 December 2022 15:16 CET
Can you rely on Sweden's Postnord to deliver cards and presents on time?

What can you still send and hope for it to be delivered by Christmas? 

The Christmas deadline for letters and parcels outside of Sweden already passed on December 12th, as has the deadline for ordering anything online and hoping for it to arrive on time, with most e-commerce companies advising customers that anything ordered later than December 19th will not arrive in time. 

But if you’re sending first-class letters, pre-paid parcels, and small packages for delivery through the letterbox, you can still send them up until December 21st. The same goes for other parcel services such as Postnord MyPack Home, PostNord MyPack Home small, PostNord MyPack Collect, and Postpaket parcels.  

And if you’re willing to pay a bit extra, you can send express mail letters, express parcels, and first class ‘varubrev’ small parcels up until December 22nd. 

“Those dates still apply. We have written in a press statement that if you send by those dates you can be pretty sure that they will arrive in time,” Anders Porelius, head of press at PostNord, told The Local on Tuesday. 

But can you trust Postnord to deliver when they say they will? 

Not entirely.

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority, Sweden’s postal regulator, ruled on December 8th that the company was failing to meet its regulatory target of delivering 95 percent of all letters within two working days, with 28 million letters delivered late between June and November. 

An investigative documentary by TV4’s Kalla Fakta (Cold Facts) programme, was sent pictures showing huge piles of late, undelivered letters in one of PostNord’s terminals, and interviewed postal workers who said that they were unable to complete their deliveries now they had been moved from daily to every other day, as they had twice as many letters to deliver on the days when they worked. 

“You get yelled at by the customers, and rightly so, you get yelled at by your bosses, and you scold yourself because you feel like you’re not able to do enough,” said Emilia Leijon, one postal worker. “We pretty much never manage to deliver a whole satchel. There’s too much post and too little time.” 

What is PostNord doing about the delays? 

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority has given the company until January 30th to carry out an analysis into why it is not managing to meet its targets, and to draw up an action plan of how it is going to improve. 

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