Relativizing problems or doing something about them

A few words on relativizing problems:

It might seem that too many* complain** about too much that is of relatively low importance. So, you did not receive your DHL delivery? Big deal—my car was stolen!***

*Yours truly included—I do more than my fair share of complaining. This text notwithstanding, I have also often pointed to it in others.

**Note that I am not just concerned with someone shaking his fists at the sky or complaining to a third party at the water cooler, but also, and more importantly, with making complaints to the offending party or, when the situation warrants it, e.g. the police, the press, a “better businesses bureau”, a relevant oversight committee, …

***Fictional example: I have never owned a car. (Or, cf. below, been married. I have, however, had problems with the DHL on virtually every occasion that I have expected a DHL delivery.)

In some cases, complaints can truly be too small to reasonably bother with and/or just be a sign that humans are never satisfied—and some complaints are not justifiable for other reasons.* However, in many, even a problem that might seem small compared to someone else’s might well be worth pursuing.

*Strong candidates for all three variations can often be found in the “social justice” area, a phrase which (today; not necessarily so a hundred years ago) is usually nothing but a code for “equality of outcome”, “I want to have A, B, and C, and I want someone else to pay for them”, “I don’t care how much I got as long as no-one else has more”, or similar.

If nothing else, there is always a bigger fish, which would imply that hardly any problem would ever be worthy of a complaint, if relative size was an all-or-nothing criterion: So, your car was stolen? Big deal—my wife died! Wife? Big deal—that plane crash killed two hundred passengers! Two hundred? Big deal—the Spanish Flu killed millions!

More importantly: if we do not complain about and take actions against the small problems, the small problems will not go away. On the contrary, they are likely to increase and they will feed an attitude that allows bigger problems to flourish. This is especially important with problems involving criminal, dishonest, negligent, or even merely incompetent behavior. For instance, if everyone who has been burned by DHL would refuse to buy from online shops that use DHL for, say, a year after the event, then DHL would be faced with the choice of changing its business practices and losing business. On the other hand, if hardly anyone does, then things will continue in the same manner—if anything, they will grow worse, because DHL executives will be tempted to increase DHL’s profit margin just a little further on the cost of its contractors (implying that they have to cut the already inexcusable service level in response), and then a little further, and then a little further, … Yes: an undelivered package is a triviality compared to a dead wife, let alone the Spanish Flu, but there is still reason to complain and to act.

Or consider the general attitude: For instance, if no-one complains about governmental privacy violations to catch child-pornographers, then chances are that few complain about the same violations against drug dealers or due process violations against child-pornographers. Lather rinse repeat, as privacy violations are extended to greater and greater groups and more and more civic rights are restricted—until such a point that sufficiently many do complain. If the process is slow enough, these violations might grow sufficiently established that the protests do not come in time. The earlier and the louder we complain, the greater the chance that the problem will be kept small.

(Make no mistake: civic rights, Rechtsstaatlichkeit, etc. lose value incredibly fast when exceptions are introduced. For instance, if due process is abolished in the case of rape accusations, then someone attempting to e.g. get rid of a political opponent by framing him will forego the murder/extortion/whatnot charge and go with rape instead. Mission accomplished.)

Similarly, if customers tolerate absurdly poor service from DHL, other businesses in other fields will work under the expectation that customers will tolerate absurdly poor service from them too.

And, yes, with regard to all of DHL, governmental privacy violations, and businesses with poor service, the time to first complain is long come and gone in many or most countries—certainly, in Germany. This makes it the more important to complain loudly today, because the development will be that much harder to stem.

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More delivery problems / DHL sucks

Looking for some items with low availability in stores, I recently placed two new Internet orders. Predictably, delivery problems ensued. (Cf. e.g. [1].)

The first package was supposed to be delivered on Wednesday, but the only thing that came was a you-were-out notification. Interesting: I was not out and no-one had bothered to ring my door-bell. Apparently, the notification had (again) been written in a blanket manner, without any actual check for my presence. Moreover, it had been taped to the outside of my mailbox, implying that anyone could have taken it before I had the opportunity. I deliberately did not collect the package the day after, waiting for the second to save myself repeated trips in the event of another non-delivery.

The second was supposed to be delivered on Thursday (i.e. yesterday). As I suspected, the same thing happened. (Except that the notification was put in my mailbox and that I also received an email notification from the sender.)

According to this notification, the second package could be collected the next day (today) after 10 AM. I duly went after 10 AM—only to find that only my first package was present! According to the store* clerk, the deliverer had not shown yet and she had already been forced to send another four persons away, who had all relied on the correctness of their respective notifications.

*DHL has few or no own locales for customer contact, instead affiliating stores with another line of business to add a DHL service as a side-business.

Moreover, the store is about one kilometer away from my apartment (so much for delivery!) and has lousy opening hours, including just three (!) hours on Saturday*. Indeed, the opening hours are so poor that it borders on the irresponsible for the store to take up this side-business. This especially as the opening hours overlap strongly with regular office hours, including an extended lunch break, implying that those who cannot be at home when a delivery is (not) attempted are exactly those hard-pressed to visit the store. I do note that prior DHL deliveries** went to another store that was (a) closer, (b) had much better opening hours.

*Sunday, obviously, is not even on the table, this being Germany.

**The last one was likely more than two years ago and I am uncertain whether the old store is still in business. However, I suspect that the current store joined the dark si…, ahem, DHL in the interim, leading to a change in area allocation.

Collecting the first package was at least ten minutes out of my day and might have been twenty or more, if the store did not happen to lie on my way to the grocery store.* Collecting the second tomorrow would be these twenty or more minutes, assuming that I can even fit the limited opening hours in my schedule—and I have no guarantee that the package would actually be there. (I am strongly considering simply rescinding my order, especially as this gives the sender an incentive to push for changes.) All this because an inexcusable deliverer is too lazy to actually ring a door-bell and risk a two minute wait …

*More correctly, it lies on a detour that I often take for the sake of getting more exercise, as the grocery stores that I usually visit are unhealthily close to my apartment.

I can only repeat my observation that the combination of delivery issues, poorly implemented websites, and the increasing difficulty of using a credit card online, makes eCommerce inferior to visiting brick-and-mortar stores—and inferior to eCommerce as it was fifteen or twenty years ago.

Excursion on other stores:
The situation is made worse by there being at least one another DHL-affiliated store closer to my apartment than both the new and the old one (cf. above), with the local post office* not much farther away (closer than the new; might or might not be closer than the old). The store clerk from above claims that these do not do package hand-outs. If this is true, it is very weird; if it is not, the area allocations are outright idiotic.

*DHL is a daughter of the “German Post”.

Excursion on working conditions, etc.:
It is well-known that the individual deliverers are under undue time and whatnot pressure, putting the ultimate blame on DHL. However, this does not absolve the individual deliverer. If in doubt, pushing the problem onto the recipients merely ensures that the situation will not improve for anyone. This is, by DHL, the individual deliverer, and (sometimes) the sender, another example of evil through ignoring the rights of others.

Some problems for German consumers illustrated by Beyerdynamic and DHL

One of the greatest problems in Germany (I suspect, in many other countries too) is the refusal of many businesses to honor their contractual obligations in a reasonable manner in a B2C setting. Depressingly often, a contract, an order, whatnot, is seen as a one-sided obligation for the customer to pay, while performance of the service, delivery of the ordered goods, …, are mere nice-to-haves. Quite often, the customer has to spend so much time seeking rectification of even obvious, indisputable errors, that the working costs* exceed the monetary costs for the product at hand or the value-added that the product/service was supposed to give. Deliveries are a particular problem, with third-party businesses performing the actual delivery, without every having a contractual connection to the actual customer. This results not only in extremely poor performance, but also in restrictions in customer recourse, and that customers have to live with whatever terms were agreed between the delivery service and original business.

*In the case below, e.g., the total time investment in ordering, paying, researching the fate of the package, writing complaints, …, is almost certainly more than an hour (this post not counted). This alone is more than half of the price of the product, compared to my working and billing the same amount of time. The form mentioned below could have pushed it up sufficiently to outweigh the entire price. To this must be added the repeated aggravation of my mood. I would have been better off had I never bought this particular product at all.

Below I will discuss a particularly absurd case that has taken several weeks to come to a (highly unsatisfactory, semi-) resolution.

Before I do so, I would like to make the following very strong recommendations (in Germany, the international mileage may vary):

1. Stay away from Beyerdynamic.
2. If at all possible, stay away from DHL (but beware that this is rarely an option left to the costumer).
3. Unless you have a specific agreement with a well-known neighbor, make it very, very clear that delivery to neighbors is ruled out. If you do have such an agreement, make this equally clear. Something like “!!!Nur Eigenhändig!!!” prefixed to the name or address might work.
4. Conversely, never accept a package for someone else when you do not have an agreement, let alone do not know the recipient personally.
5. Never, ever pay before delivery—not even when you have reason to believe that the business is not one of the many outright fraudulent web shops.
6. Consider whether it is not less hassle to just buy things in stores to begin with, even at the risk of higher prices and a smaller selection of products.

Details:

My secondary apartment (for reasons of work, I keep several households) has the advantage that the property manager has offices in the building it self, and when I have received packages when not at home (i.e. on every single occasion), it has been left with the property manager. Coming home from work, I can simply collect it, without having to search for absent neighbors, going to the post office, or wherever my package ended up.

Due to my living situation, I wanted to buy a second pair of head-phones* from Beyerdynamic, and being wary of the problems with Internet orders I (just like the last time) ordered directly from the manufacturer. Considering that this was known entity, I reluctantly agreed to pay in advance**.

*I will not mention the model, because I do not want to make even an indirect recommendation of any Beyerdynamic product.

**While I do not recall the exact set of payment options offered, a typical scenario is that advance payment is the only realistic option. Payment per invoice is very rare and/or reserved for well-known customers. The old German “Lastschriftverfahren” has virtually disappeared online. Credit cards are hardly usable, because most shops demand use of 3D-Secure (or an equivalent technology) and this, in my experience so far, results in two minutes of work and then an obscure error message. Paypal is notorious for its arbitrariness and is arguably a riskier payment method than advance payment…

I suffixed (! cf. above) my address with a statement that delivery to the property manager (NOT e.g. “neighbor of your choice”) was acceptable, even though considering this unnecessary: Deliveries had so far always been left there anyway.

The DHL delivery presumably took place nine days after my order (specifically: 2017-06-09).

To my dismay, it was NOT delivered to the property manager, but to some “Höbel” in the 18th Stock. I live in the 24th Stock, I have no idea whatsoever who this “Höbel” is, and with not even a first name added, this was not a satisfactory identification. To boot, it should have been self-evident that the delivery to a random neighbor instead of the alternative explicitly specified in the address was not acceptable.

It comes worse: According to the name signs, THERE IS NO HÖBEL IN THE 18TH STOCK! (Nor could I find a “Höbel” at all in the door-bell listing at the entry, but with the great number of entries, one might have existed.)

On the 17th, having given this “Höbel” plenty of time to present himself or at least leave a note (he did not…), I sent a complaint to Beyerdynamic, detailing the situation and demanding an immediate remedy, seeing that the situation had arisen through errors by its contract partner.

Despite my full explanation of the situation, the reply was a request that I should fill out and sign a form. There are a number of problems with this:

1. It causes even more effort for the costumer without adding any value to the process. There was no valid extra information, and even a signature would be worthless, seeing that on the off-chance that someone was lying, he would not hesitate to sign that lie: After all, no-one could realistically prove that he was lying.

   In my case, this effort is quite severe: My printer is in my other apartment and going there just for a one-off print would cost me hours; alternatively, cause a delay until I was in Wuppertal for other reasons. Using the printers at work for such purposes is shady even for employees, for me, as an external contractor, the more so. There is no* copy shop in the immediate vicinity, and finding and using one would cost me a minimum of half-an-hour, quite possibly more—too which the actual printing costs must be added.

   *Actually, there is one, but it is a complete joke. For instance, they regularly fail in printing even PDF correctly, e.g. through mishandling margins or the German umlauts—unacceptable in a business communication. The print quality (in the ink on paper sense) is abysmal and the one staff member I have interacted with on my few visits lacks even basic computer skills and takes minutes to print even a one-page letter.

   Most likely, this form was something that Beyerdynamic needed vs. DHL—and that is simply not the costumer’s problem. Basically, “DHL will not voluntarily do their duty towards us, so we will just refuse to do our duty towards the customer” / “…put the whole burden on the customer instead”, which is of course a grossly unethical and customer hostile attitude.

2. I have proof of payment. In this situation it is the duty of Beyerdynamic to prove delivery. Not only had delivery (if at all…) not taken place in a manner that could be considered reasonable and a fulfillment of contractual obligation, but there was a more than fair chance that the package was stolen (or otherwise lost/damaged)—either by this “Höbel” (possibly giving a false name) or by the deliverer, faking delivery to this unknown entity. I note that Beyerdynamic did not even bother to give signed confirmation of the alleged delivery to “Höbel”…* Failing a complete disappearance, there was always the possibility that the package would only turn up many weeks later**.

   *While that has so far been the normal next step in my experience, the value is admittedly limited. I recall some ten years ago, when DHL swore that someone IN MY APARTMENT had accepted delivery and “proved” this through an unreadable signature. A week or so later, I received a note from a near-by mattress shop, “reminding” me to collect said package. I very much doubt that the shop keeper had broken into my apartment, signed for the package, and then left with it…

   **I once had a neighbor accept a package in my name, move (!!!) without notifying me, and leave the package in her old apartment, resulting in me only receiving the package more than a month later, when the new tenant moved in…

   In as far as the package was not stolen (etc.), e.g. because “Höbel” had accepted it and gone on vacation or because DHL had made a mistake with the name or stock number, it would equally be the duty of Beyerdynamic to rectify, say by calling DHL and causing an investigation into whoever had actually received it.

3. Since it is perfectly clear that DHL had not, even by its own claims, made a proper delivery, the question of a form is absurd: The delivery (allegedly) went to an unknown third party, who was not an immediate neighbor, against any reasonable interpretation of my instructions, and with information provided to me that was too faulty and/or incomplete to identify this neighbor…
4. There is a fair chance (layman’s perspective) that requesting a reclamation on paper and/or with signature would be disallowed by the courts when the original contract was entered without such actions. There have been cases where requests for written termination have been disallowed for such reasons. Even if this did not generalize legally, the same type of reasoning would definitely leave the request unethical: The burden of rectification (termination, whatnot) must not be disproportionally higher than the burden of initiation.

   Of course, there are strong reasons to believe that at least some businesses deliberately puts obstacles in the way of the customers, so that they do not terminate contracts (on time or at all), do not file complaints, do not pursue their rights, …, for the simple reason that the hassle to achieve something is larger than the expected gain or that they just do not have the time.

I naturally refused and insisted on delivery without the need for additional efforts on my part, threatening to rescind the purchase. This just led to a renewed request for the above-mentioned form, spouting nonsense about how DHL would otherwise assume that delivery had taken place*. Firstly, again, what happens between DHL and Beyerdynamic is not my problem: Beyerdynamic chose a partner to do a severely sub-par job and has to live with the consequences; I have no contractual obligations to DHL; and DHL’s position does not remove Beyerdynamic’s obligation to fulfill the contract resp. provide proof of contract fulfillment. Secondly, DHL has no legal ground to assume that delivery to me had taken place: Delivery was not to my hands, even by their own claims. Delivery did not take place according to my instructions, even by their own claims. Delivery did not take place (if at all…), to an entity identifiable through DHL’s own claims. All this even assuming that delivery to an (identifiable…) neighbor is considered delivery in the first place, which might be what the T & C’s of DHL says, but which is obviously idiotic, seeing that I do not have a contract with DHL and have never agreed to those T & C’s—DHL might not need to prove to Beyerdynamic that the next step of the delivery has taken place, but Beyerdynamic sure as hell has to prove it to me! Thirdly, considering the circumstances, the obvious procedure would have been for Beyerdynamic to re-ship and file a claim against DHL, and for DHL to file a claim against/recover the original package from “Höbel”.

*This remains the only motivation ever given, everything else was on the level of “we need”, with no references to anything that could have implied, even on a disputable basis, a duty on my behalf, e.g. a reference to some unethical clause in their own T & C’s.

After several iterations, I escalated the issue, knowing that many of these problems result from low-level employees who are deeply stupid, naive in matters of business/law/whatnot, and/or just follow protocol for some standard situations (being unable to handle anything not in their, literal or metaphorical, script). People higher in the hierarchy tend to be much more able and cooperative. At this juncture, I also rescinded the purchase and demanded my money back (and compensation, personnel consequences, and an email address to the appropriate contact at DHL, for a parallel complaint).

Alas, this was not the case with Beyerdynamic: The answering email expressed all sorts of regrets, but eventually just re-requested the same form… Other issues were ignored (including something as simple and cheap as the email address). The request for the form was at this juncture utterly inexcusable, because this amounted to an intention of keeping my money until I proved that Beyerdynamic had not fulfilled its duties, which is an absolute absurdity.

Shortly thereafter, two weeks (!) after the original “delivery”, the head-phones did turn up, left outside my door for anyone to steal…

I reported this to Beyerdynamic together with my intention to let the purchase stand (returning the package would have thrown good time after bad), and restated my other demands. All these items were just ignored in favour of a congratulatory message… This is the more absurd, as I had just showed a considerable amount of honesty and cooperation, despite Beyerdynamic’s previous behavior: I could easily just have kept the package, sent the form, and had both the head-phones and my money back. Obviously, honesty does not pay…

As an excursion on the unethical and customer hostile blanket approach of many delivery services, DHL above all, of leaving packages with neighbors:

Firstly, for this to be at all acceptable, the list of neighbors must be limited to those who actually know each other in person and the neighbor must be uniquely identifiable. Under no circumstances can it be acceptable to leave a package with someone 6 floors away in a 26 floor building, neighbors in other buildings, or random shops in other buildings. (All of which I have encountered.) Under no circumstances can a mere “Höbel” be acceptable, nor an incorrect claim of stock and/or name. Under no circumstances can it be acceptable to just put notifications on the house door instead of in the mail box of the recipient*.

*This was not the case above, but has been a common problem in the past. In at least one house, the DHL deliverer appeared to just give the packages to a near-by kiosk, without bothering to check whether the recipient was at home, and then slap on a notice for each package on the outside of the house door, where anyone could have removed them. The record might have been as much as five individual notifications at the same time. Of course, the kiosk never checked any IDs, possession of the notice was always enough…

Further, even when a neighbor is acceptable, it is very often not in the interest of the recipient (or the neighbor—just the delivery service):

1. Collecting a package from a neighbor is often more work and/or requires more attempts than if the package was just left at a package shop/post office, for the simple reason that people spend different parts of the day at home, due to differences in working hours, evening and weekend activities, etc. In extreme cases (cf. above) a move or a prolonged holiday can cause an enormous delay.
2. This causes a problem when a package is damaged and the neighbor makes a different judgment call than the actual recipient would have done.
3. There can be instances where the recipient would prefer the neighbor to not know about the package (respectively, who sent the package or what can be speculated about its contents). Note that this is not restricted to contents of a nature normally sent “discretely”. Other reasons can include having an, in some setting/by some standard, embarrassing hobby; the package being intended as a gift for the same neighbor’s birthday; not wanting to rub a better economic standing in someone’s face; …
4. Not all neighbors are friends, not all neighbors are honest, and there is no guarantee that a given neighbor will ever actually hand out the package.
5. Delays in eventual delivery can threaten periods of reclamation and the like. Notably, Germany has blanket fourteen-day return right on all online orders. It can be safely assumed that many businesses will refuse to honor that counting from the delivery to the recipient proper, alternatively require proof that the delivery took place at a later date; instead they will just count from the delivery to the neighbor.

   (I suspect that this would not hold up in court, but going to court over the values typically involved would be next to impossible in Germany. Lawyers would not touch the case. The court would try to steer it away, e.g. through arbitration and a compromise. The effort, even with a lawyer, for the costumer would outweigh the value of the goods. And then there is the risk of losing… The lack of a “small claims court”, or a corresponding mechanism, is likely a strong contributor to the extreme attitudes of many businesses.)

In this situation, a delivery to the neighbors should, by law, only be allowed after an explicit opt-in by the recipient. Not an absent opt-out, not an opt-in by the sender, not some T & C claim by the delivery service, not whatever-saves-time-for-the-delivery-man: Only pure, explicit recipient opt-in.

Of course, much of this would be academic if delivery services had the common sense to deliver when most people were home rather than at work…