I am sure that anyone who has ever ordered anything online and relied upon a courier to deliver their precious goods, has always been extremely satisfied and never encountered any problems.

To many, the following statement may be very shocking…

Hermes are shit.

Hermes are, apparently, a courier company. Lots of online shops use them – one would wonder why, as a shoddy service from the courier, would reflect badly upon the seller.

I have my suspicions why Hermes are still in business and used by so many individuals and retailers. It is the same reason John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty, of Fawlty Towers fame, favours the services of the inept builder, O’Reilly… “because he’s cheap!”.

Unfortunately for me, one of the many companies who make use of Hermes is Leeds United Football Club. As regular readers will know, I am a Leeds fan.

The fact Leeds use Hermes does not really surprise me, considering they managed to completely mess up promotion last season.

I ordered some merchandise from Leeds United recently. I don’t know why – the same effect of displaying the club-branded tack, could have been achieved a lot cheaper and easier, by making myself a hat from a sheet of A4 paper and writing “I AM A MUG” on it.

Anyway, my Leeds United goodies were packaged up and sent on their way from northern to southern England – with Hermes…

To cut a long and boring story short (it’s gone on long enough), take a look at this…

It is one of two Hermes tracking pages for my order.

I’ll be generous and won’t rant about the events of Friday – the day the parcel was originally meant to be delivered – although you would be correct to assume, by reading the note, that the delivery was twice postponed and I was left not knowing what was going on during Friday evening. But I don’t like to go on…

By Saturday afternoon, there was still no delivery and I was starting to get a little peeved – while planning a blog post about the whole ordeal. Every cloud and all that.

I had sent a calm and happy tweet to the Hermes Twitter account. This account seemed to mainly consist of retweets from customers who had praised the service provided by the courier. These retweets contained many replies from other, less happy customers, moaning about their experience.

My tweet politely asked for an update. I am yet to receive a reply. How rude.

I may or may not have sent a further tweet to Hermes, which was less poliet thanthe first.

It was the update at 17:17 where I began to see red. “There’s been a slight delay with your delivery”.

How long is “slight”?

I also suspect the courier, tasked with the job of delivering my parcel, may have told a “slight” porky pie. Look at the second tracking page…

The update I take issue with is again at 17:17 – “Delivery attempt made, allow 24h”.

Claire and I were sat within ear-shot of the front door, so how on earth could a delivery attempt have been made? Unless…

The bit about “allow 24h” is also unfortunately wrong. A day later and still no delivery. Ooops!

Let’s be fair to Hermes. They were shit to me, but they may have been excellent to lots of other customers. Customers who don’t seem to blog or tweet much. Who knows – Hermes may have a Royal Warrant on their delivery vans. Of course, I wouldn’t know as I am yet to see a Hermes van.

Hermes are also not the only courier company, of which I have been unfortunate enough to have had a bad experience with. Yodel were a nightmare when assigned the impossible mission of delivering a wardrobe to our new house from Argos. You can read all about that in past posts.

Hopefully tomorrow will see my Leeds United junk arrive and not another extension to Pinocchio’s nose.