Monday, June 17, 2019

The first two laws of delivery

1.  A waited-for package never arrives.  Alternatively, when you want early delivery, they want later.

This almost goes without saying.  It's happened to me many times, in many scenarios, now corrollaries.

a) If you see the delivery truck pulling into your street, it's not for you.

aa) If you see the delivery truck pulling into your neighborhood, it will be for the street just past your street, unless (a).

b) If you come home early to wait for a package, it will be delayed to the next day.

c) If you come home mid-day to wait for a package, it will be delayed longer than you can possibly wait before going back to work.

d) If you are waiting for an early delivery before going to work, it will be delayed longer than you can possibly wait before going to work.


2.  When you want late delivery, they want early delivery.

Especially with freight shipments, where you want to be back from work, or back from lunch, or have the assistance of friends and neighbors to help move the freighted item into your house, so you want late delivery, THEY want early delivery, which makes all of these less possible.

In some cases, they don't just want early delivery, they force it on you by just showing up and unloading the item.  Those situations are, in theory, refuseable.  Even if they have unloaded the item from the truck and are standing in your doorway with the sign out sheet, you can refuse, insist they load the item back on the truck and come back during the scheduled delivery window.

Or at least so I've been told, after I accepted such an early delivery (it was even on an earlier day!).  It messed up my personal schedule and I lost points at work.  I was angry, but the delivery company just said I could have refused.

But the first step will be to initially suggest an early delivery window.  "We can deliver that 8-10 am on Monday morning.  Is that OK?"

Confronted with that, you ask for their latest delivery window, etc.

Then you can look forward to at least one phone call, perhaps on the day before the scheduled delivery, or on the scheduled day but very early in the morning, such as 7:30 am, with an offer, often with some claimed urgency, to make an early delivery.  You must calmly remind them of the scheduled delivery window.

Presumably they want early delivery because it saves them time and money somehow, or they can reserve the later slots for people who are paying for the extra services (in home assembly), etc.  But still, if late delivery works better for you, and they ultimately agree to it, you can expect them to be constantly trying to weasel out of it.


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