Delivery Problems

 In my repair business, although I have a reasonably large stock of new parts on hand, I need to regularly place orders for things like relays. Relays come in lots of shapes and sizes, and more particularly in a large range of prices. I have several preferred suppliers to whom I go several times a week. Most offer free delivery, some regardless of order size and some who insist on a minimum order. The problems I've had lately are probably due to competition and possibly recruitment difficulties. The cheapest supplier has done a deal with Royal Mail to offer "first class delivery", but with a wait of maybe 3 or more days. "First" reminds me of the way they changed the football league names.. here "First" or Division 1 is really the 3rd Division so maybe the Post Office have invented 3rd class but renamed it First class? Championship post is the old 2nd class and Premier class is now the old next day delivery first class?

Some suppliers no longer allow small orders and for example force you to buy a quantity of ten (or a lot more) specific items rather than one or two and some just quote very high prices for small quantities. The carriers used by suppliers are mainly Royal Mail and UPS but the former has changed its definition of first class so that next day delivery is no longer guaranteed. UPS, on the other hand has maintained "next day delivery guaranteed", but alas this is meaningless.

I quote..."First Class beat its 93.0 percent target for next-working-day delivery with a 93.2 percent performance during the three-month period. Four of the 118 postcode areas achieved greater than 96.0 percent performance and 14 were above 95.0 percent. However 14 areas were below the minimum 91.5 percent First Class performance. Royal Mail is doing all it can to lift the unacceptable performance in these areas".

"For single-piece, first class mail, they target 96% delivery in the same area where mailed within 2 days, and within 3–5 days anywhere in the nation outside the local area".

In fact....Royal Mail actually allow 15 days for a first class letter to be delivered.

This is shown by UPS at 10:00am Thursday, 6th December 2018

As my order hadn't arrived either by "next day guaranteed" or the day after, I decided to try again to re-order the same relays. Farnell insisted I pay a second time to place the same order so I refused on principle and looked again at RS and CPC. Either too expensive or not sufficient stock made me look further. Ebay or Amazon are both options as electronics parts suppliers but prices can be sky high compared with leading wholesalers, so I looked at alternative suppliers with whom I'd previously placed orders. Top Tools was one, but although I could see their catalogue, and have an account, I could find no way of placing an order, and an email remains unanswered. Next was Mouser. They have a UK presence and their website proclaims .co.uk, so I went ahead and discovered one relay was a penny cheaper and the second was 4 pence cheaper than prices from Farnell. So by moving my re-order to Mouser would actually save me money. My order met their free delivery criteria so I went ahead and placed my order at half past two, Wednesday.

Almost immediately I received two acknowledging emails and later that day (4 minutes to midnight) came the order tracking number. To my suprise the delivery is not next day, from somewhere in the UK as I'd anticipated, but next Monday (actually 3 "working" days). The reason is that the parts had been despatched from Mouser's warehouse in Grand Prairie, Texas at 4:55pm, travelled to Mansfield, Texas, then flown from Fort Worth, Texas arriving at 11:02pm in Memphis, Tennessee.

 This is shown by FedEx at 10:00am Thursday, 6th December, US times

and my parcel arrived 11:29am Monday by FedEx from their depot in Poole

 A few days later (Sunday 6th Jan) I assumed UPS had probably just gone through a bad patch at ther Southampton Depot so I ordered a set of parts from Farnell for the repair of a machine controller. A couple of 8 pin chips (U3 & U5) a transistor and a zener diode. These had failed because one of the electrolytic capcitors, C35, had gone open circuit. There's also a couple of resistors down there that have burned out. I also ordered some relays for a second job. A second batch of relays that I needed were too expensive but I found identical relays at CPC some 80 pence cheaper than both Farnell and RS. As I needed 20 this meant a saving of £16.

The Farnell order would be due on Tuesday and the CPC order probably a day or two after that. I also ordered on the Monday from Amazon an SSD for a friends computer and on Tuesday a pair of 4-port USB3 PCI Express cards for a second computer.

The tracking details told me the Farnell order was out for delivery, due end of day Tuesday. The SSD arrived at 10am Tuesday which is pretty good as the order had been placed only 16 hours earlier.

The next day, Wednesday, there had been no delivery from UPS and their tracking details said "a days delay", out for delivery by end of day. At 10am the USB3 cards arrived and a few hours later I received the relays from CPC via the postman.

At 4pm Wednesday, while carrying down the lane, a repaired computer, a UPS van sped past and disappeared a few hundred yards away in the trees. As the road doesn't really go anywhere I stood in the middle of the lane and awaited his appearance. Soon the UPS van came into view and after waving he sped towards me and found my parcel.