It feels as though courier companies are now in the business of removing parcels from the sender’s location after which point no-one (other than the recipient) really cares what happens to the delivery.
I had a DHL delivery scheduled “before the end of today”. By 11:57am it had been logged as “Delivery attempted; recipient not home”. This despite the fact that between the time it was logged as being with the delivery courier and when I was found to be “not home” there were no fewer than two and as many as five people at the property, including the builder who is working outside at the front of the house, and because there was a lot of going in and out the front door was actually open all day.
I reckon courier companies actually over-commit on what they can deliver each day and if they get behind schedule they just abandon some deliveries, marking them as “recipient not home”. In fact I’d further suggest that this may well be corporate policy given that it seems to happen on a regular basis. But then I guess that’s what you get when they make it a scramble to the bottom of the barrel to see who can deliver most cheaply regardless of the consequences. Collecting parcels from businesses who want to send them is usually easy, and if you don’t then you don’t get paid. Delivering them to the recipient is more tricky, so if it looks like it might become unprofitable, well, that’s the recipient’s loss…