SMS (Special Mail Services) Courier Reviews

Dxcourier's Comment

Written on: 11/01/2013

i am a part time courier for dx and everything the lady said about her husbands experience working for them is true, it's a total disgrace of a company who treat the self-employed couriers like dirt and pay them peanuts.
This is how you are paid...
50p per item delivered and 'apparently' 46p per mile driven.
You are given a manifest of your route which, as explained earlier, can take up half of your morning through no fault of your own due to late delivery of the 'trunk'.
Your route is planed for you on a handheld device which you also have to pay a 'hire' charge for, even if you don't need it. This calculates the distance and therefore the mileage they will pay you however this very rarely accurate or indeed even close to the actual mileage you incur. As this generally is the way you make the majority of your money then if it is out by 30% which it usually is it is then a fair chunk of your wages taken out.
An average working day would start at approx 7am, although you are generally left waiting for the depot to get ready, it takes about an hour or so to sort your deliveries out. All of this time you are not paid for, I have occasionally waited for 3 hours to get ready for us.
The day rate is worked out by the mileage and drop number, after taking away the cost of your diesel and the hire charge of the hand held they force on you, you generally end up with about £60 for 11 hours non stop work. That doesn't even take into consideration the wear and tear on your vehicle and tax etc., there are probably paper boys earning more than a DX courier does.
And, as of this week, a new edict has come in, we don't get paid if we cant leave the package. That means that sometimes, maybe after a 30 mile round trip, if someone is not in to take delivery then we would have wasted half an hour and diesel for nothing.
The couriers really want to deliver your stuff, that's how we get paid, we don't deliberately miss you out, but the job is tougher than you think, you wont believe the amount of houses who don't believe in displaying their house name or number so that you can see it.
It's an awful company to work for, I really pity the guys who rely on it for a living, the morale is very low but the company don't care as they know that in these bad economic times there will always be people desperate for any type of job.
But they will come a cropper with this new rule and loose some big contracts, when couriers look down at their manifest and see that potentially an address is a long way out and could potentially be a waste of time travelling there then they just wont bother going, parcels and passports will be late, customers will get angry and complain. Hopefully it will put a few of the people in charge out of work instead of the poor sods who put the real effort in.