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When I was a Christmas postman, many years ago, some of the bored guys in the sorting office’s loading bay liked to play a boisterous game of “catch” when parcels marked “video recorder” and “fragile” arrived. How they guffawed when one landed in the bottom of a skip with a sickening crunch, ruining somebody’s Christmas.
I was reminded of those days when a bargain iPod dock, bought online, arrived recently – dead to the world. Was it dead out of the factory gate? Or had the parcel suffered some physical abuse in transit? Now a British invention company called Cambridge Consultants has developed a sticky radio tag that will spill the beans on dodgy delivery firms.
Called DropTag, the gadget combines a battery, a low-energy Bluetooth transmitter, an accelerometer and a memory chip. Stuck on a parcel as it leaves an e-commerce warehouse, it logs any g-forces above a set risky shock level that it experiences. The idea is that when the courier puts it in your hands, you turn on Bluetooth on a smartphone running a DropTag app and scan it before you sign for it.
A readout then shows what’s happened to the parcel in transit, with the option of a graph that shows you if the box has been mistreated – and when. If it has clearly been beaten up, you don’t sign and refuse delivery. The £1.50 tag will run on a coin battery for “many weeks”, the inventors say, and there may be incentives for the parcel deliverer to reuse it after scanning. DropTag comes from Cambridge Consultants’ wireless group, which last year unveiled a Bluetooth-powered automatic gear changer for a bike.
At the moment DropTag is a solution in search of a user. British patents are already filed, but Cambridge Consultants hopes a major delivery chain or e-commerce firm will buy into the tech at the massive Hannover Messe tech fair in Germany in April.
Image by C.WisHisSoc/Everett/Rex
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When the digital display they make you sign on click the back button, it will take you to a screen that has two options, good and bad, the defult one they show you is good, change it to bad and sign.
This records that the item was received in bad condition. Always do this, it only makes a difference if you then later complain.
I never knew this!
Dodgy delivery firms? So, Royal Mail then.
I’d rather _walk_ to the source for all my mail than entrust it to Royal Mail. Somehow, I doubt anything like this would stop them, either. It doesn’t seem to matter how much their shoddy practices and deliberately incompetent workers damage your post or actively avoid delivering your parcels because it’s easier to just drop the red card in the door without ever knocking – they just don’t care and continue on regardless.
After all, when you’re being paid a crap salary for a crap job, why would you care about what you’re doing or how bad the service your supplying is?
Just pay extra for your courier delivery and have some piece of mind and better mandate to get pissed off and get recompense if they screw it up.
My current postman has put a “sorry we missed you” slip through the door for the last 5-6 parcels. Every single time somebody is in. Each time, I just request redelivery for the following day via their website and he looked incredibly unhappy each time he actually has to do his job and delivery the parcel.
We’re talking about parcels the size of a can of juice. Hardly massive boxes.
Personally it’s couriers that I’ve had the most problems with. Our regular local postie is also my neighbour and he always rings a couple of times before putting a card through the letterbox.
By contrast a fortnight ago a next-day parcel by courier took five days, ended up in Belfast by mistake then came back via Warrington and half the country before arriving. Which was the latest in a string of courier problems I’ve had. At work some of the courier drivers joke about whether the loaders have managed to get one of our (large) parcels on the van intact.
Had far more parcels via Royal Mail, I suppose the quality of service depends on the quality of staff where you live, for RM and couriers.
That would be pretty cool having your postman as a neighbour. At least that way when you get a “Sorry we missed you” card you know it is next door so you dont have to goto the sorting office to collect your stuff.
I like having trustworthy neighbours that will sign for stuff on your behalf.
I’m lucky in terms of Royal Mail – I live about three minutes from the sorting office too!
It is good to have neighbours who can take parcels for you, especially when couriers are involved!
The RM are the most infuriating company I deal with. My favourite is when they knock on my door trying to deliver something to the same numbered house on a street with a completely different name.
Or the time they delivered something to me where I was in completely the wrong postcode (the only bit that was right was the county) to what it said on the package.
Or what about the time I returned something I had bought which was dodgy and it never arrived with the company – lost in the mail.
Or what about all the other advertising crap and circulars they shove through my door every week…
Utterly crap organisation.
Just sign for it – with a strange signature! They could never trace it, unless they were to use GEO mapping on the PDA devices (actually, shoot – they probably already do lol).