A North Tyneside businesswoman has lashed out at a Hermes delivery driver who left her package containing a £160 pair of designer trainers under a wheelie bin on a busy road in a clumsy attempt to hide it.
Karen Hindhaugh received a message from Hermes on Sunday afternoon whilst she was out saying “your parcel has been delivered and signed for at the delivery address.”
The attached delivery photo showed a wheelie bin belonging to a neighbour some metres from Karen’s Tynemouth home on what is a well-used public road in the centre of the coastal village.
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When Karen arrived home an hour later she found the parcel in its clearly branded wrapper not inside the bin as she had thought but wedged beneath it in full view of passers-by using Percy Street.
Karen, who is the managing director of Tynemouth-based Right Angle PR, said: “I’m horrified that Hermes could have left my package beneath a wheelie bin on a public road.
“Because most of the houses in Percy Street don’t have access to a back lane, many of the residents leave their bins in a dirty and muddy recess by the side of the road which is easily accessible to anyone who’s passing.
“Anyone who saw the parcel being delivered could easily have taken it. It’s shambolic.”
Karen had received a notification that her parcel was due to be delivered between 12pm-2pm on Sunday, and had expected it would be left with a neighbour if she wasn’t home in time.
She said: “I’d missed an Amazon package about 30 minutes before the Hermes delivery was made that was successfully left with a neighbour. No attempt was made to leave this package with them.
“It was wrapped in a bag that clearly said it had come from Moda in Pelle, so anyone would have known it contained shoes.
“If I hadn't seen the parcel under the bin, I might never have got it. The bins are emptied every Wednesday and the chances are it would either have gone out with the rubbish or, if a passer-by had seen it, they would probably have thought, given where it was left, that it had been discarded and they may well have just taken it.
"I would then have been left trying to get my money back from the retailer, who would have been notified the parcel had been successfully delivered and signed for.
“You have a choice of whether your delivery is left with a neighbour or in a safe place. Leaving a parcel under a neighbour’s wheelie bin on a public road at a distance from the delivery address could no way be regarded as a ‘safe place’.”
After being contacted by ChronicleLive, Hermes has apologised to Karen. In a statement the company said: “We successfully deliver over 700 million parcels a year, but occasionally things do go wrong. We have been in touch with the customer to apologise and have provided a gesture of goodwill.”
Karen is not the only Hermes customer to have been left dismayed by the courier’s service.
At the end of last year Citizens Advice published a league table of delivery firms, with Hermes and Yodel at the bottom.
No firm scored more than three out of five stars for their service.
Regulator Ofcom – which is cracking down on the sector following a rise in complaints – released its own research in December which found that 64% of customers had experienced problems with deliveries in the preceding three months.
