Are you fed up with getting ‘the card’?

Consumers across the country are angry at the apparently growing trend among Australia Post delivery drivers to leave calling cards instead of the actual packages customers expected.

People have reportedly been home, with no music on or other noise that would prevent them from hearing the doorbell, yet been left a card telling them “they weren’t home” when the delivery driver visited and thus they have to retrieve their package from the post office or postal depot. With Australia Post posting a profit of $35 million, it’s left some to some to wonder whether these non-deliveries are a cost-saving measure. One one man interviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald, which first reported the issue, said, “I suspect this [profit] is off the back of not actually delivering parcels and instead making many people pick them up.”

Some online commenters on the SMH’s story have offered their solutions to the problem of being home but not having your parcel delivered. 

One person called Neala said, “The best solution I have seen is someone that stuck a label on their letterbox stating ‘Couriers: I am home. Please ring the buzzer’.” But another, more sceptical, commenter responded, “That probably still wouldn’t work. You would also need to add text like ‘P.S., I have CCTV cameras aimed at the letterbox. I will know if you didn’t knock on the door’.”

Australia Post told the SMH that, despite customers’ perception, there wasn’t an increase in parcels not being delivered, and that drivers are adhered to the national “knock and call out” rule that requires drivers to knock three times and then call out to the homeowner before leaving a calling card.

But many people online insisted that this did not happen, at least in their experience.  Or, as one user, Fred, said, “Left a nice note on the letterbox saying ‘we’re at home, please knock’, next to open gate with very short path to front door, with no dogs, guard cats or similar, at home all day, no loud music or similar distractions. Still got carded by the delivery ninja.”

“I’m tempted to put some sort of movement sensor on the mailbox to buzz the doorbell next time, maybe combined with a wireless camera to see if they actually make any effort to knock at all,” Fred added.

What is your experience with parcel delivery? Do you think there’s been changes to how deliveries are made? Have you been a victim of the card-dropping ‘delivery ninja’?