Hacker News Reader

Comment by dripton | Hacker News Reader

They could.

But one of the bad side effects of "free" delivery is a race to the bottom in quality. My neighborhood UPS guy is awesome -- he rings the doorbell, if it's raining he puts a bag around each box, if a box is heavy he'll bring it inside for my wife. The local Lasership folks (different ones every time) are far less awesome -- they just drop the box on the porch, not bothering to ring the doorbell, not bothering with weatherproofing. So we've had a couple of boxes soaked, even when my wife was home, because she didn't hear the delivery.

I'd pay a couple bucks more to get UPS over Lasership, but it's not easy for me to select that option with most web merchants.

View on HN

Is there no such thing as "signed delivery" there? Almost every single thing I've ordered online where I live (South Africa), was delivered in-person. They would not leave the package until it's been signed for. If you're not there and there is no one else to sign for it, they will take it to the post-office for you to collect. And yes, this happens even with "free-delivery" online stores.

Heck, sometimes when import duties had to be paid upon delivery, they would stay upwards of 20+ minutes while I went to a nearby ATM. In those cases, they could just as easily have taken the package to the local post-office for collection.

It's up to the seller. If they insist on a signature then the delivery won't happen without one. But that doesn't happen much in my (nice, suburban, US) neighborhood. I guess package theft is rare enough that the extra cost of requiring a signature outweighs the extra risk of not.

I'm in SF and Amazon packages use Ontrac. Ontrac appears to use contractors that just have a sticker on the side of their car with the logo. In the last month alone I've had them forge multiple signatures + report a package as delivered when I've been home all day and nothing arrived. And other times they throw it a decent distance or put it in front and it's stolen within five minutes.

Amazon re-ships via UPS/other and it arrives acceptably. The worst UPS has done is not knock/ring and that's rare.

90%+ of my packages via Ontrac had forged signatures, misreported delivery statuses, not actually arriving, [...]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com