Can we invoice a courier for wasting our time?

[Lucan Unlordly]

I have the app downloaded for a well known courier company that keeps us informed of the expected time of delivery for any orders we've placed with various suppliers. It generally works well but on occasion, as happened today, a delivery expected on Monday is earmarked for attempted delivery on a Saturday. A message is received, I cut short my shopping trip with the missus and dutifully pop into work to take delivery.

10 minutes out from the ETA a message is received to say we are 3 drops away and the driver will be with you shortly. 5 minutes later a message appears to say 'sorry we missed you', with an image of some unknown business unit. A call to the hotline and a promise that the driver has made a mistake and will return within the hour - on top of the hour already wasted - and it's a no show.

To put some perspective on this, apart from the grief, I lost a 2 and a half hours out of my day and have to go back to town tomorrow. Two other businesses were effected, one where the owner was 40 minutes away and had to find somebody to look after his kids. He lost 4 hours of his weekend. We all received the same rogue image.

Before anyone says, yes, the delivery was due Monday so it's no big deal, but that's not always the case. A failed delivery is often added to the end of a round so the likelihood of a 4pm, as opposed to a 10am delivery on Monday is enhanced, and for us, that's a problem..............and the very reason I dropped what I was doing today.

I'm not entirely serious about wasting my energy on legal action and compensation for lost time, but this is the third time it's happened in recent months and nobody is listening.

 

[japancool]

What does your contract with the courier company say?

 

[Lucan Unlordly]

What contract?

We were the recipient, not the sender!

 

[japancool]

What contract?

Exactly.

 

[JEREMY HAWKE]

"We are only liable for loss or damage of goods We are not liable for consequential losses "

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it

 

[Lucan Unlordly]

"We are only liable for loss or damage of goods We are not liable for consequential losses "

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it

Lol?

I'll let you know where the pipe is when the courier attempts to re-deliver today. You'll probably hear him squealing

 

[Gordon - Commercial Finance]

To directly answer your question, yes you can invoice a courier for wasting your time.

Supplementary question though would be "will the courier pay the invoice?"

The answer may involve smoking a pipe or something like that...

 

[pentel]

We used to ship full lorry loads of goods and got charged if the load wasn't ready when the lorry arrived at a pre booked time and the driver had to wait. Totally understandable.

If however the the lorry didn't arrive on time and we had to wait several hours for them to eventually turn up then we had absolutely no chance of being reimbursed.

 

[Paul Norman]

It doesn't help much, in terms of the inconvenience, but it is the supplier's responsibility to get the stuff to you. If the courier fails to do so, the supplier must fix it.

 

[Lucan Unlordly]

It doesn't help much, in terms of the inconvenience, but it is the supplier's responsibility to get the stuff to you. If the courier fails to do so, the supplier must fix it.

The supplier had done all they could, the courier had, initially, done all they could to deliver. The weakness in their system is the Drivers that take it upon themselves to determine that a business is probably not open on a Saturday and lie about attempting to deliver. That from where I'm sitting is the Couriers fault, the sender having no cause for complaint as the parcel wasn't due til today.

I spoke to today's driver, told him to give Saturdays guy a kick in the bxxxxxk's for me and he said it's the difference between self employed and employed drivers?

 

[Excel-Expert]

If you could I would be worth a mint by now.

I live in a village which is off the beaten track and our deliveries are often the only ones the driver has for miles around. There have been loads of times where I have been watching the tracker and seen the exact moment the drive has thought "sod that", turned around and marked us down as not being in.

No matter how much complaining I do, it doesn't stop and had become a pointless exercise. It has however made me select different places to shop from. If it is a choice between a company using Royal Mail and a company using Evri/Hermes, I will use the company using the Royal Mail.