We had our share of package delivery adventures lately. The highly optimized logistics companies like DHL might have reached their peak meanwhile. The peak where service quality actually starts decreasing due to the amount of optimization they put into it.

We live in the country side where post offices are sparse. We still order stuff and have it usually delivered to our doorstep. Delivery time is usually one or two days more than in metros like Berlin. But still its very convenient having stuff delivered instead of picking it up in the post office 25km away from you.

So this week the DHL delivery guy couldn’t be bothered to knock on our door to deliver two packages. He went strait to our neighbor to drop them off. But the neighbor refused to take them for whatever reason. So the delivery guy just left us the card can we can pick up the packages in a random pickup place in the next village. That’s but 25km from our place.

We called DHL and demanded a second delivery attempt. Since we don’t have our own car here, we’d have to pickup the parcel either by bike or means of public transport. Both options would take us almost the entire day.

The next day the delivery came to deliver another package to us. He felt really sorry. Even more so as he had the previous package that we were desperately waiting for actually on his car. But he was not allowed to hand it over as his tracking system would only allow that the next day. So he drove the package around for another day before he was able to deliver it to us. That’s what I call over optimized on DHL side.