Barbara Ter-Nedden, for example, the owner of the Parkbuchhandlung (Park bookstore) on Koblenzer Straße, has had bad experiences with DHL since March of last year. She posted notices on the outside of the bookstore to inform the parcel carriers that despite the lockdown, there was someone in the store to receive the deliveries. Despite this, she said that numerous packages were returned to the publishers, marked as “undeliverable.” Ter-Nedden told GA on Friday that she found this to be an outrage.

As a consequence, she now has important packages sent to her home address. When she's at the bookstore, she can't obviously can’t receive the parcels at home, but she at least gets a notice which allows her to pick up the package at a branch. That is working so far.

DHL spokesman Achim Gahr checked into deliveries to the bookstore over the past four weeks. The result: of 40 packages, 30 had been delivered, but ten had not. "At the moment, I can't explain why the delivery person didn't deliver them," Gahr told the GA, "We'll sort it out and can only apologize to the customer.”

She had just told her story to the GA when a customer called who had ordered three books from her in the first half of January but never received them. When she followed up on the shipment, she found out: It had been properly sent on its way, but had gone missing in the Neuwied parcel center and never turned up again afterwards. Now she has submitted an inquiry on the missing parcel.

In the meantime, a quality control manager from DHL has visited Rita Fricke, the senior citizen from Pennenfeld, said DHL spokesman Gahr. The 84-year-old confirmed this to the GA. Several times before, she had complained that the carriers had not even tried to deliver packages and had only thrown in notices. "No one ever did anything about those complaints." The quality control manager now left his business card, she said. "At least now I know who to contact, and that's what I'm going to do."

The DHL spokesman also pointed out that they had taken the case in Pennenfeld as an opportunity to remind all delivery people in the Bad Godesberg area that they should work as instructed. "Our people know that they should ring the bell, wait, and only put in a delivery notice when no one is there." He said that applies to both parcel deliverers and letter carriers who also deliver smaller packages, according to Gahr.

The Federal Network Agency, based in Bonn's Tulpenfeld, received a total of 18,867 written complaints nationwide last year - or more precisely, at the Federal Network Agency's Postal Consumer Services. According to the Bonn-based agency, customers sometimes give several reasons for their complaints. According to the agency, a total of 32,339 complaints were received last year, half of which concerned parcels and a good third were about letters. When it came to complaints about parcels, 72 percent had issues with deliveries. Loss, damage or theft accounted for 14 percent of the complaints.

According to the Federal Network Agency, there is nothing that would indicate serious deficiencies in Pennenfeld. "However, should the Federal Network Agency receive indications of impediments to the basic postal service in the future, it will examine these and request the postal service provider concerned to correct the problems," the agency told the General-Anzeiger.

Complaints about undelivered packages can be submitted at www.bundesnetzagentur.de, and then under the "Consumer Portal" tab. The Deutsche Post DHL hotline is ☎ 02 28/4 33 31 12.

(Orig. text: Bernd Eyerman / Translation: Carol Kloeppel)