"Delivery" by Amazon

[FoxEye]

Holy crap.

Checked my email this morning to find my package is "delivered". Yet we've heard nothing and seen nobody.

Open the front door and literally they just left it on the welcome mat outside. It's been raining on and off and the package is electricals, inside only a cardboard box.

Not only that but our house is on a terraced estate and anybody walking past could just have helped themselves to the package.

Seriously, why are (some) delivery people so **** stupid? And in such a hurry that they couldn't have knocked? We were up and about and could have received/signed for the parcel.

A couple hours later, and if I hadn't checked my emails, the damn thing would have been ruined.

The delivery company on the tracking info is "Amazon". Not DPD, Hermes or whatever. Just Amazon. I hope they're not always this bad!

/rant

 

[FoxEye]

You got it, undamaged. So where's the problem?

Lots of could haves but

It's been raining on and off. It wasn't under a porch or sheltered in any way. It was easily accessible by any passer-by.

I got lucky, because I checked my emails first thing (I don't normally do that).

Would you leave a package fully exposed to the weather not knowing what it contained?

I mean it just doesn't seem like a smart idea, does it? Either for me OR the company I purchased it from.

You can bet that this kind of delivery will see a) increased incidents of theft and b) increased incidents of damage.

Sure neither of those happened to me in this case, but clearly this is going to cause problems for many.

 

[FoxEye]

I think what you're all telling me is that now is a really terrible time to order anything expensive.

Otherwise somebody passing by my house is going to have themselves a nice new PC build, completely free of charge

 

[FoxEye]

A lot of first world problems in this post. Get over it

This is the stupidest phrase, ever.

"I've just bought a £500 bit of electronics and I'll be absolutely fine if it gets stolen or left outside in the rain. Because to complain about this would be to ignore all the starving children in Africa." (I'm exaggerating the cost of the item which wasn't £500, to make a point. It could have been a £500 CPU or GPU quite easily).

Seriously, the phrase is mostly used by people as a lazy way to dismiss real problems.

Why is it a problem? Let's talk about waste, shall we?

When a £500 bit of electronics gets lost or damaged needlessly, another £500 piece of electronics needs to be manufactured to replace it. Think of the wasted energy to produce that item. Think of the wasted materials. Think of the energy that gets used mining for those materials. Think of the transport costs of shipping those goods and their replacements.

If you think lost, stolen or damaged goods are just "first world problems," then frankly you aren't engaging your brain.

We need to be smarter and more efficient with our use of finite resources.

A big part of that is cutting down on waste. Wilfully allowing goods to be damaged needlessly or stolen, due to an extreme lack of care, is contrary to everything we should be doing right now.

The "first world problem" that your post demonstrates, is that we don't understand, or just don't care, about waste.

 

[FoxEye]

If you're that environmentally concerned then the best thing would be not to buy that £500 bit of electronics in the first place.

Why should we have a choice of two extremes?

"Don't buy anything," being one those two choices and "Don't care about waste and just view everything as disposable," being the other?

Surely buying things and still being conscious of waste is a fairly solid middle ground?

We should all be conscious of waste.

A huge amount of waste in our society is entirely avoidable.

Again, the first-world problem here is just not caring about waste.

 

[FoxEye]

Does caring about waste include fly-tipping?

I'm strongly against littering. We often litter pick around the lanes here.

Most of our biodegradable house and garden waste is composted, in fact, and re-used on the garden.

I know what you're referring to. Emptying a bag of brambles from the garden into a coppice will be completely indistinguishable from vegetation that grew there naturally.

You can call that littering or fly-tipping to make a (somewhat daft) point, but what do you think happened before we had Recycling Centres? Garden waste was either burnt or just left to decompose in piles. Or dug into the ground.

A bag of brambles isn't an environment catastrophe - the planet is perfectly capable of dealing with waste vegetative material because it is entirely natural, decomposes readily, and becomes food for other plants and animals.

Hardly the same thing as plastic/electric waste is it?

So yeah I'm perfectly happy to say we sling the odd bag of brambles into a nearby coppice. After a few days it's pretty much gone - natural processes at work. And we regularly clear that very same coppice of crisp packets, beer cans, and other crap (which we sort and take to the recycling centre FYI )

 

[FoxEye]

It's fly-tipping whatever spin you put on it.

Good job on collecting the cans though, how many do you need to collect to offset the environmental impact of your latest purchase?

That's fine. My conscience is clear because I'm doing no harm. It's pretty off-topic to be honest. Brambles aren't manufactured by human processes, are they.

Back on topic, I do what I can to waste as little as possible. That doesn't mean I'm carbon neutral or anything like that. I'm not conflating those two issues as you seem intent on doing.

I find it odd that people are so happy to endorse practices which promote wastefulness.

Nobody wins when we stop caring about wastage. Nobody gains anything from being wasteful.

You don't save money, because the more wasteful we are, most likely the more money we have to pay to offset it. You think retailers and manufacturers won't price in losses due to deliveries that were damaged or stolen? If those things happen with greater regularity, the cost of business will increase, and therefore the cost of your goods will increase.

You can waste as much as you want, but it will eventually hit you in the pocket, even if you never realise it.

 

[FoxEye]

Not very secure tho, in respect of leaving a package as they were for all to see, being left outside as the Xbox was for most of the day.
The safe place was accessible and ignored and both deliverers marked as handed to resident.

Point taken on the 12v Crimbo lights, I'll let her know

For us in our area the deliveries have been good. Left within our enclosed front porch of we are out.

Round our way that XBox would probably have been "re-delivered" by some opportunist in about 5 secs flat

We have a lot of traffic through our estate, not people that live there but lots of randoms going from A to B.