Chronopost deliveries

[Polarengineer]

More in the UK delivery drivers pitching up in hatchbacks, with the back seats loaded up with deliveries, I wonder if the correct insurance is ever in place??

It would seem that free society has pasted itself into a corner with rules and legislation. Do doctors and vets pay special insurance to carry their business tools in their cars?

[exile]

They should do. The only reason a doctor or vet would have tools of the trade in their car is if they are going to a patient. Ergo the car is being used for business use.

[exile]

The company that does the pickup outside of France delivers it to a hub that may or may not be nearest to the delivery address. At the hub it can change hands to a different courier firm or anything that turns up with a pulse for the final leg. That is why so many things turn up in a van with no logo on the side. And no matter how extensive the original delivery address is given, that address is often incomplete by the time it is given to the last driver.

That is not quite how it works, but I can understand why you would see it that way.

The main courier companies have arrangements with other firms outside of their normal sphere of operations. So outside of the big cities around here, firm A may have an agreement with firm B to make the final delivery to areas to the South and East and another agreement with firm C to cover the West and firm D for the North.

Almost by definition, the number of deliveries to these outer reaches is not sufficient to be economical for daily deliveries.

So lets take firm B covering South and East. They will have their own deliveries in this area and they may also have an agreement with another major shipper, firm Z, to cover this area as well. In this way, final deliveries become more concentrated in a small number last leg firms. Where their combined business is significant, they may use their own branded vans; but where deliveries to an area are patchy that is when they use subcontractors - in their unbranded vans. If there is no or little business for an area on a particular day, rounds can be conglomerated and some of the subbies end up with no work that day.

This all makes economic and environmental sense with a country area covered by two or three principal delivery companies rather than eight or ten delivery companies travelling through the same area each with a handful of packages 5 or 6 days per week.

It is not as your post suggests, subbies turning up at a depot hoping for some deliveries. They will be "contracted" to one final delivery company and will know a day in advance what and where they will be working. They will usually have a fixed area with sometimes rather fuzzy boundaries. It is because of this, that if you have a bad experience with a delivery company it is likely to be repeated over and over. My comments about GLS being useless in the past but now excellent, coincided with unbranded vans being replaced with GLS own vans and drivers.

It is perhaps not the work that many would wish to take on, but it seems there are enough out there to do this work. It is in fact close to zero hours contracts except that the subbie is actually working for himself rather than the delivery company itself.