"Somebody please, for the love of god, fix shipping/couriers" . In my opinion the "Someone" must be the online retailers. When I see to which great lengths Amazon goes to provide a great customer experience, and then it's all destroyed by the courier - it hurts. The only thing that prevents me from buying online instead of going to a brick and mortar store is shipping.
It seems like there are a lot of great people shipping locally. In London there are a whole bunch of same-day and same-hour couriers. At my old agency we'd order DVDs for directors from the HMV on Oxford Street and a bike courier would bring it to us. There's a great courier service who launched with Argos recently called Shutl. But scaling this to a national or international business is hard.
As always I'd like to see an Apple solution to this problem. A premium price paid for a premium experience.
I'm in London, so access to a larger carrier isn't an issue (in theory). I can literally see the Parcel Force depot in question from the top of my building.
On paper Parcel Force aren't that bad. They said they'd be here between 2-4pm. I got home in plenty of time for that. The problem is that their driver lied to me, them and then turned up in a grumpy huff at 7:00pm and snatched the parcel away from me with an asshole stare.
You know what would have been quicker and only twice as expensive? Flying the damned thing to Glasgow myself. £60 on the plane and 3 hours to get there and back, vs. a 5 hour wait in my house.
