Internet gift not arrived? Pity the drivers paid just 45p to deliver it
BY THe time that Sarah is free to talk, it’s getting dark. Sounding tired and a trifle depressed, she talks me through her daily grind on the front-line of Britain’s booming courier industry.
each morning, Sarah drives her battered Peugeot to a depot in South London owned by Hermes, one of the UK’s largest delivery firms.
There, it is filled with packages: around 50 on a normal day, but nearer to 120 at this time of year.
Sarah is then required to deliver all the items — mostly consumer goods purchased online — to addresses across a postcode- sized portion of the capital.
For each completed drop-off, the company pays her 55p. except, that is, when the item is classified as a smaller ‘packet’. Then she’ll receive just 45p.
‘On a normal day, I can do my round in just over three hours, if I really hurry,’ she says. ‘But in December, with the Christmas rush, it can take twice as long. either way, it’s not exactly making me rich.’
That’s quite an understatement. Sarah, who is required to work six days per week, aims to get rid of a package every four minutes. even if she hits that relentless target, she’ll end up being paid a mere £7.50 per hour.
Sarah must then use part of that already-tiny income to pay for petrol, specialist courier insurance, and everything else it takes to keep her delivery vehicle on the road.
‘I drive about 30 miles on each round, so even with petrol being quite cheap at the moment, I’m basically making minimum wage [£6.50],’ she says. ‘The money’s awful, but it’s a choice between this or living on benefits.’
Sarah, who is 45 and has a grown-up son, is one of tens of thousands of socalled ‘lifestyle couriers’, poorly-paid contractors who are i ncreasingly employed by delivery firms to bring shopping to our door for the lowest possible cost.
UNLIKe traditional postmen, who earn a salary (so are comparatively costly to employ), ‘lifestyle couriers’ are not officially on the staff of the firms they represent. Instead, they are selfemployed and largely untrained.
They provide their own vehicles, foot the bill for fuel and transport, and work unlimited hours. They get no holiday or sick pay, no pension, and can be sacked instantly. They are only paid per parcel they successfully deliver to your door, rather than per hour worked. And they typically receive nothing if they leave a ‘sorry you’re not in’ card in your letterbox.
As a result, many, including Sarah, feel tempted to find any means possible to empty their vehicles, as quickly as they can. Often, that means leaving packages in porches or behind garden fences rather than going through the time- consuming business of actually handing them to homeowners.
‘If you earned more, you might take more care. You might think twice about chucking parcels over gates, and leaving things in silly places,’ says Sarah. ‘But the company seems content to pay us the smallest amount it thinks it can get away with. The only way to make a living is to do things as quickly as possible.’
This, perhaps, explains why the internet is being swamped with footage of couriers abandoning valuable items on doorsteps, throwing fragile packages over locked gates, or leaving sensitive electronic equipment in the rain.
Thus week, it emerged that a delivery man working in Cheltenham on behalf of Amazon resorted to leaving one family’s Christmas presents with their rubbish. Homeowner Phil Norrish, 43, only discovered the valuable items after finding a note on his front door telling him they were ‘in the bin’. ‘We only spotted the note at about 10.30pm on Saturday night and were a bit mystified. We went to our wheelie bin round the corner and saw the two parcels inside on top of the bags of rubbish.’
Yodel is Britain’s biggest private delivery firm. It handles more than 135 million parcels a year and claims to work with 80 per cent of t he country’s top stores.
It was forced to stop collecting newly-ordered items from retailers over the weekend, in order to clear a backlog of previous orders. Last month, a worker for Yodel, which is regularly voted the worst parcel service i n the UK ( and employs 5,000 ‘lifestyle’ couriers), was caught on a CCTV camera chucking a ceramic poppy 25 feet over a garden f ence when he was unable to reach a customer’s front door.
The footage emerged as dozens of other purchasers of the £25 poppies, which had been planted at the Tower of London to commemorate Remembrance Day and were subsequently sold for charity, posted images of shattered or broken ones on Twitter.
However, it is not clear which companies were responsible for delivering these.
Further horror stories have swamped social networking sites in recent days amid reports that couriers for a slew of major retailers, including Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, and Waterstones, are in chaos, as they struggle to cope with a surge in the number of presents bought online.
HeRMeS admitted it was suffering delays of two to three days, though it blamed these on a fire in a Warrington sorting office. Other problems were reported at Citylink, which delivers for Mothercare, John Lewis and others. So why are things going so wrong? The firms blame an explosion in online shopping that has, according to Yodel’s chief executive Dick Stead, ‘far exceeded anybody’s expectations’.
It’s true that online retail sales surged on Black Friday, when an unprecedented £880 million was spent online in a single day. The following ‘manic Monday’ also broke records, with £660 million spent. But analysts aren’t convinced. ‘These delivery firms are like florists on Valentine’s Day: they know this busy period is coming, and they have plenty of time to prepare for it, so it’s shocking to see them having these problems,’ says Guy Anker of Moneysavingexpert, a financial advice website.
‘We haven’t seen much extreme weather. They just are failing the customers. The retailers need to think long and hard about the companies they are doing business
with.’ Sarah and many of her colleagues say the chaos is an inevitable result of rival delivery firms waging a relentless battle to drive down prices, whatever the effect on their service, to win the c ustom of c ost- c onscious internet retailers.
‘Things are stretched at the best of times,’ she says. ‘When you double or even triple the number of parcels in December, is it any wonder that firms can’t cope?’
Staff morale is clearly a problem, as well. Hermes only uses ‘lifestyle couriers’, employing around 10,000 of them. But they hardly seem like a happy bunch. An internet forum for people who work in the industry has in the past two years received 35,000 posts about the firm. The vast majority are critical.
‘It’s a demoralising company to work for. We do long hours for poor pay, mostly,’ says Graham, an employee from Kent who I meet on the site. ‘They have been taking on more delivery staff for Christmas. But a lot come in for a day, see what the job involves, then quit.’
Beginners, who must learn a delivery route, often work slower than seasoned staff, so initially earn as little as £2.50 an hour, he adds.
A Hermes courier from Inverness, 48-year-old Shirley Beattie, says she quit the firm after six years. In that time, her pay, in a semi-rural patch where petrol costs are higher than in towns, was reduced from £1.20 per parcel to 87p.
‘The job just about gave me a nervous breakdown,’ she says. ‘Every year, it got tougher, and the money got worse. The company took on too many big contracts without making sure we could cope. I was working 12-hour days, for a pittance.’ David, who worked for a large firm in the South-West, says that seasonal delivery staff tend to be less efficient than their experienced colleagues.
‘There’s also a problem with a few of them being dishonest, and stealing stuff,’ he adds. Elsewhere on internet forums, tales of corporate ineptitude abound.
One parcel company is said to have taken on workers from Eastern Europe to help in its sorting offices, only to discover many were unable to speak fluent English and struggled to read address labels.
Another company is said to be giving workers so many parcels that it takes them until 1am to finish their rounds, dropping packages with bemused and bleary-eyed homeowners, or simply leaving them out in the street overnight.
The industry, which has no proper regulator, faced criticism even before this week’s debacle.
The fate of ‘lifestyle couriers’ has been raised in Parliament by Labour MPs, who believe firms are exploiting a loophole in the law by classing them as selfemployed, when t hey are effectively full-time workers.
‘These people have no employment rights. They get no paid holidays, sick pay or maternity leave,’ says the TUC.
‘They make very little profit, often work long hours, and in many cases earn the equivalent of less than the minimum wage. Companies use them for one reason and one reason alone: to save money.’
The real problem is that consumers want the cheapest deal possible — and companies want to make as much money from them as possible. Something has to give.