With shoppers increasingly relying on private parcel companies to deliver online purchases, Dispatches goes undercover to find out why couriers sometimes fail to deliver. www.channel4.com/programmes/di...
yeah as a mail worker it cracks me up to see people freak out about stuff like this. granted the scene in this video is pretty disorganized obviously, but if you think this is rough handling, wait till you see what the sorting machines do to your packages and letters! ahahaha
I have been doing agency work for ukmail for about a month now and I see the same thing day in day out people throwing stuff like this I treat every parcel with care no matter what the wage is I'm there to try and make a living not lose the chance of earning money buy breaking people's stuff for no reason
this just goes to show people who side with the workers who throw boxes all over the place that things can get done working the right way...with the right atitude and a good system...having a good system is the difference whether something gets done fast or slow...i give you an example...i used to be a dishwasher in a very busy restruant...when i work at nite, my coworkers always told me that im fast and that my dishpit area is always clean...so one nite happen to jsut visit the restruant at nite and happen to pass by the dishpit area...the dishpit was piling with dishes, the dishwasher looked upset and frustrated...i could tell he was pizzed and bcuz he was already slamming the dish racks from his frustration...i watched him do his work for a few minutes and the reason why dishes and silverwares were piling up is bcuz he had a bad system...a good system wouldnt haved allowed all those dishes and silverware to pile up...its no different working at the post office...a good system makes for a more organized and quicker results.
+simon chune Look at all those computers falling on the ground. They are expensive and easy to damage. I wonder how much they lose in damage claims from their total carelessness.
CityHeron if they are doing the job they should be doing it right, if theyve a problem with pay they should either leave the job or take it up with management not fuck up strangers goods, this shows a lack of care for others happiness and frankly and lack of self respect, they arent even worth £5 an hour! Scumbags
I worked for Royal Mail, and despite the criticisms, some of them justified I admit. I can honestly say that the work ethic within Royal Mail during my time there, was one of pride and efficiency. And customer care was at the forefront of that work ethic with most people I worked with. The organisation of sorting mail, especially parcels, was far superior, and encouraged that on the whole, items were handled with the best care possible. Of course there are idiots within Royal Mail who do not care about the way they handle items. And such people are duly reprimanded. And accidents do sometimes occur too. But most criticisms from what I can gather, are about items not arriving on time. This is mainly due to changing working practices, and staff having to adjust to these practices, when they have been used to doing things a certain way for many years. Practices implemented by management who don't actually do the job of sorting mail. But on the whole, Royal Mail is STILL the premier mail carrier within the UK. This 'UK Mail' sorting office looks chaotic and untidy. And the staff certainly do not show any pride at all in their work. Shocking and disgusting way to treat customers mail. You would certainly be reprimanded at Royal Mail for treating your work this way, and ultimately sacked if you failed to improve.
Shame royal mail are shutting all the village post offices. 20 mile round trip and half a day job by the time you have queued for ages for some of us rural dwellers.
@@peskyparttimers8239 It ain't Royal Mail anymore, well not as far as an integrated business anyway. The post office is a seperate business, like Parcel Force, and BT, which used to be part of the GPO. The Post office is still under the umbrella of Royal Mail Group plc, but the different parts of the business operate on their own, and are responsible for their own profits, and loss, which was supposed to make the whole business more competitive when it was privatised. Hence why they close post offices that only serve as banks where people cash their pensions. Sad but true.
What are you talking about? You've obviously not worked in an MC then. I did and we threw parcels, left them outside in the rain in yorks when we were busy, the automatic sorters tip an entire container out on the conveyor belt and Tracked 24 means nothing. Royal Mail are useless.
For all of the people justifying this with poor wage, competition, etc - that's bullshit, practically every industry is competitive. This kind of negligence happens only when the employee lacks the ethics to behave accordingly and can get away with it, pay and work conditions are a correlation but not causation.
Pavel S Guess you never worked in one these places.Try Unloading a double decker HGV with 4000 packages on your own in under two hours max weight is 60 KG of cause shit is going to get thrown all over the place.Do you think any of us have time to piss around by being girly with a package when people who order online for the next day & want it at there door by 9 Next time go to the shop & fucking buy it
@@stevec5885 How The fuck do you justify that, when half of the goods gets broken and damaged in transit, if you can't deliver goods intact, then simply close your business and leave your job let someone who is more committed to do the job right, with dignity. This is the biggest problem in our industry ,many people are simply assholes with no experience and training and right attitude and want more fucking money for less and less effort, they can't be arsed to lift parcels and place them and throw things about , fortunately I send parcels weighing over 20kg, and these arseholes could not throw these heavy items as they would throw lighter delicate items. Uneducated bastards don't know the words Fragile, Handle With Care, DO NOT DROP, they need to fuck off to sweep roads on dole money.
Oh yeah, my center was nothing like that in the video. Some harsh throwing here and there like the airport luggage and that's it. If people want quality go Royal Mail, where the staff are actually looked after!
Anyone bitching about these employees not being paid better... Not one person inside that warehouse was forced to work there. They all knew what they would be earning BEFORE they accepted their positions. So, it's no excuse to show up at your place of employment & perform like a 10-year-old because you think you're entitled to better wages. Act like a responsible adult, earn your paycheck, and thank your lucky stars that you're not living under a bridge. Got a shitty work ethic & a bad attitude? Don't expect much.
i worked for uk mail and can tell you this happens management dont give a toss parcels are flung from the back of a van onto the main sorting line and not enough staff to deal with the amount of parcels coming through. you dont get time to be careful it's non stop. the parcels falling of the line is due to that bit of the belt not being driven so they all just pile up and fall off your expected to run your ass off and try and put parcels away. i can honestley say it was the worst job and work enviroment i have ever experienced.
This is where ours have gone "missing" things are definitely getting stolen. My workplace also deals with them and our items are expensive and always go missing!! Their company is still running, how? Please do an update on this.
I spent one day in Ukmail and saw this and management did not care that it was being thrown around glad i wasn't employed by them, the amount of damage in one of their hubs was disgusting
I think it is to be expected that packages will be subjected to a certain amount of rough handling when being moved through a courier's network, which is why we package our items carefully before sending them, but this video appears to show deliberate, wanton abuse, which is not acceptable behaviour.
I have worked for UK Mail for over 7 years at 3 different depots, Plymouth, Exeter and now Leicester. Plymouth and Leicester depot were very strict on how we treated Parcels where as Exeter (not far from this Bournemouth depot) did not care at all, the workers there were lazy, and simply didn't care. Exeter was far worse than this depot and was very poorly managed
I work for DPD. Package throwing does happen but the bit with the packages falling off the belt isn't because people are throwing them. The packages are mixed heavy and light. When the belts get backed up they don't stop. So the heavier packages push the lighter ones off the belt. We get everything from glasses to flat packed furniture. Package throwing does happen but if you're caught doing it, you get an ear full if not a warning (mostly). We handle anything from 14,000 to 30,000 packages a day depending on the team. So obviously things falling off the belt does happen.
This was recorded 10 years ago, since this documentary and many more express package services gave taken notice. I know because I remember when we used to almost trow packages and suddenly after a documentary about another firm our management changed opinion. This documentary is really helpful because if no one reported about it it would've continued until sale prices went down.
Used to work in one of those places but for other company and this is exactly how it looks like. Rarely packages are handed carefully unless they are flowers haha Even brand new phones were flying round in the boxes. From the other hand you cannot be surprised if people are in the fricking cold, not able to go to the toilet unless they will find someone to cover for them, getting minimum pay working from hired agency. the rule is simple: If you don't appreciate people's work and you don't keep high standards then you will get a shit service- simple. Oh by the way- yodel is the worst company I have even received service from! had to deal with them x3 and each time I had massive problems to get my package on time/in one piece or just to bloody get it! YODEL don't you dare knock my door or I will knock you out!
The Uk system is completely broken. Late deliveries , damaged items , lost items etc. In my entire life i have never heard of something like this, i never had a damaged item or items left outside my house. When i first moved to Uk i was shocked, a friend just told me "get used to it, you in UK now".A country where no one cares about no one, it's just ££££, everyone is blind with £££. Sad story.
this is why i get a delivery man with a box 10x the size of the thing i actualy ordered.. even for things that could not possibly be destroyed unless stabbed or burned. that could have otherwise just fit through the mailbox
Minimum wage = minimum effort. This is what happens when these muppets are forced to do jobs they don't want by JobCentre Plus. I'm guessing its 12 hour days and antisocial hours with no overtime rates or bonus scheme, low moral and no job satisfaction. BUT to be fair if you send something on a courier it should be packaged well enough to withstand this abuse. I send hundreds of items a year but had never had anything damaged in transit.
Has anyone ever done this job? Ive just finished my second shift. And let me tell you, I think I shift around 3000 parcels by 6 hours sweating my nuts off at minimum wage 1am-7am. After being under those conditions you couldn't give a flying toss for the parcels.
if you dont wana work there. then dont. theres plenty of hardworking people who would jump at the chance of doing a way better job than those people there. dont start mishandling public parcels etc
The problem is that in a workplace with a culture like that any hardworking person who genuinely tried to be careful with every parcel would inevitably be visibly/measurably slower than all the colleagues around them, and it would be that slowness that would keep getting picked up on by management, rather than their higher standards of care towards the parcels. In such places everything is on a strict timeframe, all profit relies on doing as much as humanly possible in the time available, and it's the people who are the quickest that are deemed to be the best colleagues, more-or-less regardless of their methods of achieving this quickness. I've seen it in the past with both the parcel courier industry and before that in the supermarket industry, and it is always, in my experience, because staff become very heavily conditioned by management to do a fast job rather than a flawlessly good job (or in some cases expect both inhumanly fast work AND absolute perfection, however impossible it is to actually achieve both at once). If the hardworking person in your example did go into the job with the aim of doing a way better job, it would lead to them being picked up on for being slow so often that either they'd lose their resolve and fall into line with the 'standard' that everyone else is 'achieving', or else if they continued to stick to their guns and insist on doing the good job they want to do they'd either get sacked for repeatedness slowness, or more likely, since they are probably agency workers, they'd probably just not get offered any more shifts at that employer, and as such their agency may also then drop them from their books as a 'flexible resource' that they are no longer willing to send out to other employers.
Yodel tends to pull shit like this as well - I ordered a Corsair keyboard (other keyboard manufacturers are available!) which was delivered to me by Yodel, and not only did it take an extra day because the employee decided to fuck off and not deliver the last of their parcels because their shift ended in two hours, but when it finally did arrive, it looked like someone had stomped on the box! Fortunately, the keyboard was okay, but still really stupid behaviour on behalf of the courier.
I used to be a parcel and the depot I worked at, This is tame in comparison, However we had 4 zones around the trailer of skips for each area code, And as the trailer was being unloaded we had to throw items off into these zones, I used to be the person on the conveyer belt throwing items off, I tried as often to do so with care and if items were at risk of breaking I would aim for bags on the ground which could be clothes maybe to cushion the blow. Big items such as the old CRT widescreen tv's or furniture etc would be left on the belt to be 2 person lifted into separate zones, If a member of staff was free to take items off they could but we tried to avoid stopping to get the trailers unloaded as quickly as possible, We often had 3 to 4 fully loaded to do each night, Sometimes would get a brucey bonus which would take us well into overtime for when the daytime drivers came in for their usual out sorting / loading to deliver etc This often would put some of us in a bad mood (Me definitely) I was in my young 20's still so had a bit of an attitude but we were all tired and exhausted but had to get the job done! However this system of throwing items off was the only effective way we could get the job done as quickly as possible. Christmas times was the worst though!
It's almost like it's coming down the line faster than workers can humanly handle, and so they give up with defeatism and accept that the higher ups do not care about the packages. I've worked for these places. You get told off for stopping the belt. Even if it's to stop wine smashing. Everyone saying "they have bad ethic" or calling them names, should simply go to one of these places and attempt to maintain decent work ethics.
In a similar courier I worked for in the past the manager was rushing around doing all the same work as the rest of the colleagues, but with the added stress of also being manager. In other words one or more of the people in this video could very well be a manager on the shift in question, they are unlikely to be dressed differently in such companies, and as I say are doing the same work as everyone else during most of the shift, so you'd be hard pushed to tell them apart from regular collegues (other than occasionally shouting at everyone else, as mikeg alluded to).
This is true i've worked as a package handler in fedex we just threw things and sometimes boxes fall out from the pallets we removed from the truck using a forklift and it didn't matter wether it broked or not
I'm never the one to leave youtube comments ranting, but all these comments defending these "poor employees" who have to "lift heavy boxes all day" what fucking incompetence, terrible. Clearly zero respect shown for their customers property, and that's who owns all these parcels - their customers! I don't see one single employee rushing, I see a group in the back chatting, employees moping around, and one guy taking a few seconds to deliberately aim and swing a bubble wrapped, fragile marked parcel across the room. What an absolute waste!
It’s the cost of cheap. A courier will arrive there at 6:30 am and not leave the depot until 11:00. Then he has to deliver 150/200 parcels and then make it back with your collections and then go home to his family. The problem is UKMail management treating their drivers like dirt and also the customers when they look down on them or make their life harder.
Super Kids I work for the royal mail too and I don't even think about stamping or lobbing a parcel on one end of the building to the other it's people who work there with no sense of humour or safety for the work and the clients parcels.
Lets hope its YOUR new laptop or phone that arrives in pieces next then. Karma is a bitch! But seriously, you're not cool, and certainly not clever. You're just a fucking PRICK!
+xsxcx What makes you think that? Just file a claim against them if the box is damaged badly enough. I hope that everyone who has had something damaged or broken by them made them pay for the full cost of repair or replacement. There is no excuse at all for what I saw. They are supposed to deliver packages and people pay too much for such shitty service.
Approved Food used UK Mail for my order, well what can i say... should have been delivered yesterday but their system said delayed and today i rang only to be told it had been "damaged"
Nothing has changed they are an utterly shameful courier, the web site is an utter disgrace, and to try to contact them by phone is virtually impossible, they are a complete and utter waste of time and effort.
Looks a lot like what I've heard FedEx distribution centers to be like. Except minus the using of bat shaped objects ones and smaller packages as balls...
That is shocking to see. If it was any worse, they would be kicking the package to your door. I would think they get a ton of complaints of broken and damaged items. That is the largest in the UK?
They have managed to damage solid mdf wooden crates. I'm not suprised after seeing this. Literally the worst company I have had the misfortune to deal with, and they are making my working life a living hell.
seems like unhappy workers...if thats the case, why still work there and damage items that people have bought or being sent to them? these people should get fired.
@joe pesci >>>these workers should treat all these packages as if its the property of the usps...because in reality, the usps is responsible for all packages once it is in their system. if i worked for a company and damage their goods/services, do you think they would still keep me because they need me? people with bad work ethic is dispensible...be real sir. people with good work ethic with a good system can get things dont just as fast as people who try to take short cuts to get things done...and throwing boxes all over the place is taking a shortcut.
This is commonplace in the industry. If a dirt cheap service is paid for, that is what is given. Employees on zero hour contracts, minimum wage, psychopathic slave driving managers. What does one expect?
My God I see lots of lawsuitsgoing to people that spend your hardworking money buying computers and whatever else and then when it comes to the people's home and then you call FedEx or UPS they say it's not them so you have to call the company might have happened at the company we got to be some extra money in my pocket this year
Eeeeeek! The Royal Mail used to be a good public service that enabled private enterprise as much as it served the public. Now we've messed up a part of our infrastructure by all this privatisation nonsense. One industry where it really doesn't help.
This is what happens when you don't pay people enough and you treat them like slaves. This is a very hard job. Moving heavy packages around the whole day non stop with not enough staff. It kills your back. Who would want to break their backs for a mere £7.30 an hour
i worked in warehouse, moving/loading/unloading/repacking 72 tonnes a day for year for 6,30 still worked hard to point my health deteriorated some people are just making excuses to behave like assholes
Fair enough, working night shifts to get the parcels ready for the drivers. I already worked night shifts working from monday to sunday only one day off (saturday) it's nothing for shit wage
I spend around £7-10K a week with UKMail which is lots of items. All of which are electronics goods. The cost incurred for damaged goods a year runs into tens of thousands for me, I can now see why!. I just cant understand why the UKmail MD did not say 'right, this is terrible and now we are going to meet with all depot managers to make sure that our customers goods are now treated with care', no, he said 'we only have 500 damages' , that must just be me then as I must get at least that amount!!
In the US clerks throw them into route hampers like basket balls. 10% of the time they miss and just leave it in the wrong hamper. And who gets blamed? The carriers. The last person who hands it to the customer. It's a big fucking joke too for the clerks. At least in my office. I come in the morning and see them laughing it up...talking on their blue tooth phones while half paying attention to their job. Some clerks are hiding out in the bathroom 1/2 the day. When I get back from my route both the clerks and management are usually just joking around loudly, acting foolish and the second a carrier steps foot in the office it's …."Hey! get your ass back to my desk! Explain why the computer says you backed up today! No! You're going to have to get on a conference call and grovel to the district boss live and in person!" Then one minute later....."HEy boo shake that money maker! ha hahahaha What who needs to be cleared for accountables? I dunno I don't give a fuck. I'mma gonaa be in da bathroom . Cya's in two hours LOL!
And I bet you this lot are annoyed when one of this parcels turns up broken. Whenever I walk my dog there's a UK Mail delivery driver in their van having a sleep. Sack them all.
If they're sleeping in the van it probably means they are working multiple shifts virtually back to back and just grabbing a quick bit of kip as and when they can on their break (for the most part it'd be unlikely they would bother to drive back to depot for their breaks). Most courier's van drivers are deemed to be self-employed, and earn only a small amount of money per parcel, so the longer they work the more parcels they deliver and the more chance they have to earn enough to make ends meet. Being self-employed they have no HR department or directly responsible manager to tell them they are working too many hours, so some drivers will take as many shifts a week as they can get across any or all of the three shift patterns (earlies, late and nights). Obviously drivers on nightshift are not delivering to customers (with the possible exception of other businesses where a nocturnal delivery has been agreed) but there are still plenty of self-employed drivers driving van loads of mail between the courier's various depots etc.
terrible to watch ..the best courier I had was UPS bought a CD player etc from germany and could track it online all the way to UK track it across Germany arrived well packed and good order
Yep and still do it. Parcels falling off the belt happens all the time, it is not intentionally done. Although you stop giving much toss about the parcels they are taking it to the extreme in this video.
From January 2024 I cannot receive a parcel, 3 of my parcels are missing from Langley Heathrow and I don't know who they hire at January, but someone is tracking my parcels and collect them from Langley❗ I am expecting very important medicine and I am afraid they are not coming❗ And I can't do nothing...
The cherry on the pie is the fact that they are not responsible for damage or loss unless you pay premium. This is the world we live in. Everything is made of shite.
I'm pissed. This is unacceptable. I depend on the careful handling and quality of mail service to make a living in order for my package contents to arrive to the addressee in one piece. What I see in this video should not be happening. After seeing this I might consider getting into a new line of work.
Worked for Parcel Force Never seen Parcel Force behave in this way being part of Royal Mail means they have to have standards, remember it was the Conservative Government who wanted out side companies to come in to deliver parcels it seems every thing the Tories touch they break and smash it.
Not much has changed your slating them for throwing crap about but management want wagons unloaded as fast as possible the shits allready falling off belts you turn belts off you get called worse than shit put there staff under unnecessary presure going 100 mph
ive just sent 20 min on the phone then cut off once a woman started speaking then another shot further 20 min wait she stated i thought u where waiting on 3 parcels to be delivered no sorry just one ok thats the only reason its never been sent out yet ive had 3-4 emails saying its going to be here at diffrent times... shocking service i only bought from the seller as they had postage down as parcelforce which i think would have been a far better bet !!