Deutsche Post complaints and criticism

so my mother sends this letter to me, right?

correct name (you would think... I mean, she has known me for a while...), correct house number, correct post code, correct amount of postage, the worx. only... she spells it Conradstrasse instead of Konradstrasse

result: DIE Post sends the letter all the way back to friggin belgium! takes 3 weeks!



in comparison: when I lived in Luxembourg, I once received a letter that had only my name and Luxembourg on it. no street name, no house number, no post code, no village / town name. and I received it. these Die Post w*nkers can't even figure out Conradstrasse and Konradstrasse are actually the same frigging thing! (and I mean, those who know my name will agree that there is a 99.9999999999% likelihood that there is no-one on the face of this planet with the same combination of names as me, much less in Toytown. and I am duly angemeldet at Poccistrasse. they can find me. watch them find me if ever I forget to pay a 50ct bill!)

at the beginning of august i sent my lil sis a care package per ship to the states. the post said, here it says 10-14 days. and i said, um per ship? they said yeah. i kind of chuckled quietly.
well it's mid-september and she hasn't received it yet. i know for a fact that stuff from the states takes 6-8 weeks per ship so i know damn well german service isn't faster!
oh yeah, for 2.5 kg, i paid €40 (i think).

f*$cking lazy postmen!

2 packages all ordered same day, express delivery all returned to the shops with unclaimed stickers on them within 3 days of their initial dispatch.

Unclaimed my arse. THe post office just sent them back! I had no cards I had no notification.

I had to get them redispatched at my cost!

GRRR

Pootle

Complain. If they say that they did leave cards point out that on those cards it says they will keep the packages for seven days.

It was hard to choose which thread to put this on, there are so many!

I had 2 letters to post to England and my (German) boyfriend took them to the post office. One contained several sheets of A4 so I hadn't put a stamp on, so they weighed it and charged him the appropriate amount. The other one contained only 1 sheet of A4 so I had put a 55c stamp on it. He handed over that letter and asked if the postage amount was right. The post office person put it on the scales, said 'yes', and kept hold of the letter. The next day, that letter was in our post box, with a sticker on it saying it was returned due to insufficient postage and an additional 1.60 was required. We think maybe there are some rules on the envelope size, (it was slightly smaller than A5 size), but if that's the case, the person working in the post office should know that.
We were not impressed!

HOT TIP

NEVER NEVER put your return address on something. Deutsche Post will take any excuse to return to sender. Insufficent postage, wrapping damaged, they really love returning to sender.

If there is no return address, they have to deliver it. that is true whether you are sedning post from Germany or receiving it.

my poor nana got her letter sent back to her as well. She had written
The Resienstrasse instead of Theresienstrasse. Same thing, correct zip code, city.. dumb fuckers.

You know there's some German loser who has nothing better to do than sit at the separating station and say, "nope.. there's a space between the e and the r, that's gonna be confusing, let's send it back to the 90 year old woman, make HER go back to the post office for stamps and send it again."

Managed to send my mum's birthday card off on time for the first time in years.
55 cent stamp on a German bought birthday card.

Of course, they said it should have been EUR 2.00 becuase of the shape and kindly retuned it to me. Missed my mum's birthday.

I'm pretty sure there is no such German loser, the reason the addresses have to be printed exact is that they are scanned and read by a magic postal machine. The machine doesn't use common sense so if part of the address is missing or ambiguous it gets sent back.

What so you cant write on the envelopes by hand???
I am about to send my first piece of mail in germany today, the cancelation for my old T-Online internet account, who would have thought, you can do everything online these days, and the first company to require me to actually write out and send in an old fashioned letter would be germanys main internet provider!

Anyway, so even if I use my very best hand-printing, will it not get through?

Sure you can write it by hand but the address must be legible (and correct).

Like I said the machine is magic. In other words I have no idea how it works only that I sent a letter where part of the address would slide out of sight and had to be shaken in order to read the whole address. I was advised that the machine wouldn't be able to read this.

Best one from good old DP is the one for a new passport, it arrives by mail...you are at work when it arrives...so you have the little card and go to collect it...but you cant because you dont have a valid passport, its in the mail that they wont give you...not a joke took me 45 mins persuading the jerk to open the mail so he could see it was my passport.

That's my story Scoggs!
it really happened to me.

Personally, I have few complaints about the Deutsch Post. They're damn fast. I remember as a kid (in the US), my best friend and I used to send each other letters so that we could get mail too, like the grown-ups. She lived 2 doors down from me, and the letters would sometimes take up to 2 weeks to be delivered! Stick your local letter in the mail here before noon, and 99.9% of the time it will be delivered the next day.

MonksTown...it hapened to me as well, and when it does it sounds funny on here but in real life I was not happy, as the passport I had to apply for was a lost one so didnt have any photo Id and was due to my to paris in a few days for work, really stupid thing was when they Xrayed my luggage they spoted the lost passport in the lining and wanted me to explain why I now had 2 of them and seemed to be hidding one of them in the lining of the case

Phew. Looks like I am the lucky one. Never had any problems with them. Recently started a mail order business and have had no complaints from them. Send a package this Friday evening and it was there Saturday afternoon in Hamburg! The customer couldn't be happier!

However, I find them a tad expensive.

My German wife sent a birthday card to her brother in Koblenz. Everything was written as it should be accept she put "To Christian Birthday Boy Schmitz"

Over a week after his birthday the doorbell rang and her brother answered it. The Postman stood there with package in hand and asked if there was a "Christian Birthday Boy Schmitz" living at the address!!! The "Birthday Boy" bit caused a weeks delay.

By contrast, a lorry driver at a company I worked for in England had a serious accident whilst on the continent. The drivers in Belgium clubbed together and sent him a present "To Big Dave, Henley, England"...5 days later he received it (got in the local papers too!!!)

I cancelled mine with a fax.

be patient with good old snail mail. it depends on the IQ of your postman. if he's reasonably clever, he'll manage. if not, sh*** happens. consider that there may be regulations towards ensuring service - would you like your mail being "really delivered", or would you like your mail to be dumped somewhere? first case result is that you - ok after a while - learn that something really has gone wrong. second case result is that you'll maybe never know.

Reading the following story reminded me why I hate Deutsche Post so much. The Royal Mail managed to deliver a letter which had only the recipient's name and a sketch map of South-West England with an arrow entitled "Somewhere here". Given that Deutsche Post sent a letter posted to me back to the sender because the PLZ was one number out, I think that we can be fairly proud of the Royal Mail and understand why New Labour are trying to run it into the ground.

Posties solve map address riddle

I think you are all going to get a lot more angry about this!

According to Yahoo:


Deutsche Post may not deliver post Saturdays starting next year. This will be done in order to sink costs, and will be decided at the end of this year.

Wow, I didn't think it was possible to hate them any more, and then...

This is the consequence of the privatisation and introduction of the market that everyone clamoured for.
Same as closure of post office, removal of letter boxes etc etc etc

I quite like Saturday post but it isn't that important really - there are plenty of other countries with no Saturday delivery. A reasonable idea I guess

MoiLV you have been here too long! (to sink costs )

Cos they are doing it to sink costs!
Plus I'm not sure they find it easy to recruit and keep staff.

Exactly the same as in the UK. The Royal Mail had its services opened up to competition, so private operators came in and cherry-picked the most profitable operations (like bulk mail), leaving Royal Mail with the unprofitable business, like the delivery of small letters from Cornwall to the Hebrides, and a correspondingly enormous debt. Now they want to increase the price of stamps by 25% to cover some of their losses. Don't believe the Tories: privatisation usually ends up costing the public more.

who says 'sink costs' in English? (zu senken) lower or cut costs?

I'm reviving this old thread because I'm so mad I could spit! I thought the US post office was bad, but this is horrendous! A family member mailed 9 packages to me from the US, costing over $350. All of the packages were mailed on the same day and were addressed identically. 2 of the packages were delivered in about 10 days. The remaining 7 packages never showed up. I assumed they were stuck in customs and tried to be patient. After waiting 2 weeks, my husband called the customer service number (my German still sucks) and was told that they had no record of the packages, but that we should go to the local post office. We went to the post office, who also had no packages, nor any record of them, but told us to call DHL. We called DHL immediately, who told us that the packages were still in customs and they gave us the correct tracking numbers (US tracking numbers are useless here). Inputting the tracking numbers on the DHL website only told us that there was no record of the packages...what the. So we call DHL again, and are told this time that we should call our local Customs office. The Customs office tells us that the packages were sent back this morning because Deutsche Post was "unable" to deliver the customs notice. I don't work yet and am in the apartment for most of the day. Our name is on the buzzer, which has only been rung twice in the past 3 weeks, neither of which was by the Post. After calling Deutsche Post again, they say they attempted to deliver the notice once, left no notification that they attempted, and never attempted to deliver the notice again. How the hell would we know that the items are sitting in Customs waiting for us?!?! The packages are now being shipped back to the US, at the loss of hundreds of dollars, because Deutsche Post couldn't be bothered to ring the f-ing buzzer or leave an f-ing note. I've filled out the complaint form, but I'm not holding my breath that that will actually accomplish anything. DHL has put some kind of emergency hold on the shipment to try to stop it from leaving Germany, as has the Customs office, but both readily admit it probably won't work.

/rant

Sorry for the rambling rant, but I'm so angry and frustrated I don't know what else to do.

We have had many complaints about the service (not) provided by Deutsche Post (one time a neighbor brought in an Amazon package for me which she had found lying in the middle of the road in the snow). We have been given the run-around between our local post office and Hamburg, my partner kept pushing until he got a Frankfurt number to call. He called what is the equivalent of the post office general and was told that the mail carriers are contract workers over which the post office has no control. More or less concluding - you get what you pay for or as they say in the states, 'minimum wage, minimum labor'.

We live in a small community where we become familiar with the people we do business with on a regular basis. I love our regular mail carrier. He was delivering mail to the market while I was going in to shop, he stopped and gave me my package. Sometimes it's the people that make the service, not the service.

for everyone who has people sending stuff from the States. My mum sent me a package and it took 11 days. Apparently everything goes priority mail. But the kicker is if you actually get the priority mail stamp or the little paper stuck to your package saying its priority mail you supposedly get it quicker. Figure they take the other stuff and let it sit for a bit. But just a tip. The post is quirkly like that.

Man don´t get me started on this institution.
1) Where is the law that states you must wait in Germany?. They have sometimes 8 people working in my post office and yet in England your average village Post Office would serve the same amount of people faster with two old biddies. And they´d smile! They spend half their time renovating the building and putting plasma screens in it...why don´t they just use a "newsagent/post office" like everywhre else? They seem to enjoy working slowly, so you can feel hungry and sad while you wait. So you wait throughout most of your lunchhour, and you d think they knew about the services they provide...but they don´t.. they normally have to phone to ask someone else how to shrug their shoulders about "how long does a slightly strange size parcel take to get to England?".
2) On the way out, after youve wasted the whole of your lunch hour ( because it wouldnt get there before you next go home on holiday anyway), you suddenly decide you want to buy a few envelopes at the kiosk where the woman has been standing with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do for the past hour.And she looks at you like your e mad and says "but this is the stamp counter...all those products next to my kiosk..They not here can be bought! .they must at the post desk afer the queue paid be!"

3) Ive had roughly 50 % of all mail returned for various reasons: Str. not Strasse, wrong price for oversize envelope, atamp not perpendicular in corner...and once...they argued that putting my 5 digit post code after the town and not before was a justified reason to return the employment contract I had believed to be sent, signed and dusted. for the past year I have got other German people to write out the snail mail envelopes for me. I ve never had this problem in the three other countries Ive lived in. I have a suspicion that they are nationalistic people with a grudge against foreigners...In England My Grandmother often sent me something to the wrong post code, with the street name spellt wrong with the wrong postage stamp and it still got there!
4) Did you know the posties also deliver half of your junk mail...the stuff you dont want and just sits clogging up the front hall?
5) I blame the Deutche Post for the recent floods in England, Global warming and maybe even for Dianne´s murder.

Holy crap, I just got a phone call from some sort of Customer Service Manager in response to my generic online form. They're still attempting to recall the packages and have them delivered. If that fails, they have agreed to honor any claims and fully reimburse the sender the lost funds. I'm gobsmacked!*

*I've always wanted to use that word in a sentence...the chance has finally arrived!

they dont have much things to do or what?

A friend failed to send me letter 3 times just becos she wrote aUgustina instead of Agustina for my name. Exact address, number, flat, city, plz, except that damn U

If im the postman I will say: "Oh this person had tried three times to send to same address. Hm...then its only wrong typo of the name. Ok I will put it in Miss Agustina's mailbox..."
Doesn’t sound difficult and Everybody happy!

I had to post 300 letters the other day to addresses around the world. Sending over 50 identical letters qualifies for InfoBrief discounts. On a small letter within Germany, the price drops by 20 cents from 55 to 35 cents, a saving of some 36%. Large letters are bizarrely only discounted by 10 cents, from €1.45 to €1.35, a saving of scarcely 8%.

International letters are charged according to the total weight of the letters you are sending. Because we were sending large but relatively light letters (still around 90g each though), the price for international letters worked out at €1.12 per letter – LESS than the €1.35 we had to pay for the letters to Germany. It cost us MORE to post a letter to someone 500 metres down the road than to the people in NEW ZEALAND! There is something very, very wrong with the bizarre pricing system this company uses.

I always found the easiest way to get a post complaint resolved was to go the the Deutsche Post website and fill in one of their comments forms...

When my post wasn't being delivered after moving here I filled that in and within 3 days all my post from the previous 6 wks appeared!

luckily our postman are smart... I got my letter even though I am newly moved in to this house and my sister forgotten to write the house number... only have the road name... lol... it was funny though

I sent a letter recently. The person's name was correct, so was the company name, the street name and the number, and the name of the town. The only thing that was incorrect was the postcode. Here are the two possible scenarios that could have then occurred:

• The British way: Spend 30 seconds finding out the correct postcode and sending the letter on its way. After all, everyone makes mistakes and as a public service it's our duty to help!
• The German way: Send the letter back to the sender! Until people learn to correctly address their letters they'll have manage without having their letters delivered! What are we, some kind of public service?!

Guess which option Deutsche Post went for.

30 seconds = about 8 cents in staff cost.

It's cheaper to just have the computer dump it in the "return" bag.

If the Postleitzahl is wrong and there is no sender information they will research and correct the problem before delivering it on, albeit somewhat delayed (about a week as it goes via an address research office). If there is a sender address given they'll send it back for them to correct. Makes (German) sense really. The sender learns from his mistake and they save the hassle and cost of researching the problem.

Here's mine to the list. A friend of mine in Dublin posted her wedding invitation to my German address. It never arrived and was returned to the sender in Dublin because 'there is no sender address'.

I assume Deutsche Post just sent it back to Ireland and the Irish Postman, opened up the letter to get the RSVP address on the wedding invitation.

As far as I can tell the letter had my correct home address. I gave it to her twice and the replace card never arrived either.

My parents have sent me letters before without ever including the sender address and it has arrived. Is there a law or some regulation that dictates that the sender address should be included, and that overseas letters have to have this too?

Anyone know what the process is to file a complaint about your mailman? Ours is needs to be fired.

What they do NOFX?
Complaint to your local sorting office if it is a serious issue.

No delivery on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday this week. They finally turned up at 11am today (they normally come at 8am, sometimes even on a daily basis) to deliver the mail, some of which was posted last Saturday already. It really is quite incredible that in a modern, Western country, the postal service just decides not to bother with a particular street for three days in a row. It's lucky I'm not trying to run a business here. Oh, wait a minute...

The complaint form was completed this morning, so I'll see if I get an explanation. Still missing one packet that I know for a fact was posted on Monday with Deutsche Post.