OT: Yodel delivery failure

That's Royal Mail in my area!

Royal Mail has always been good here, until recently, and it has now been deteriorating. I get a weekly magazine on subscription, it is due on Saturday, it usually arrives on Friday, for years. Now, it arrives on Friday or Saturday 50% of the time, if I report it to the magazine subscription dept. on Monday afternoon, it arrives Tuesday, or if I report it on Tuesday, it arrives Wednesday.

Recent Yodel deliveries to me were actually delivered by Evri (ex Hermes).

Even though Evri here is brilliant, the problem with my package was that it took far too long to get from pickup to Depot (almost 2 days). Evri could not have overcome that. It sounds as though it got left in the van when it was unloaded at the depot. It is small-ish (12"x2"x2").

For completeness, it was delivered just after 1:30 pm today.

They seem to spring out of nowhere. Mine had sat at the local depot for a week and arrived unannounced today.

My experience with a few different delivery firms is that they tend to shower me with lots & lots of emails saying "we expect to pick up a parcel for you!" - which are not at all helpful, but when the actual delivery fails to happen on the predicted day they go entirely silent and tell me nothing. (They may keep on repeating the predicted delivery tine/date well after it has passed). In other words, lots of touchy-feely messages which don't offer useful information, and then gubber-all when the whole thing goes wrong.

Our house seems to be on the tail end of a delivery route and the driver often just returns to base, with any outstanding deliveries still in the van.