Good service, bad service

[lars_bergquist]

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Let's take the good service first: I sent an Elmarit-M 1:2.8/90mm to Will van Manen (http://www.kamera-service.info/) for focus adjustment and coding. It made the trip Sweden-Netherlands-Sweden in just eleven days, including one weekend. The job was excellently done. The cost, €175, was a fraction of what a trip to Solms would have cost, the time was an equally small fraction of the two months at least that factory service takes -- and the Gnomes of Solms would have insisted on me letting them have my camera all that time too!

 

As long as the job is well done -- as it was here -- these small service operations are not competing with Leica Camera. They are doing the brand an inestimable service.

 

Now for the bad service. I mailed the package to Mr. van Manen -- no problems. He mailed it back to me -- immediate problems. Because somehow, the package became derouted from the ordinary Swedish Mail service to a shady operation that Swedish Mail keeps on the side, called Posten Logistik. There was no necessity for this -- the package was small. But here comes the interesting part:

 

A legitimate logistics company, like UPS, phones the adressee when it is obvious that the adressee is a private person. Private persons cannot wait interminably inside their front doors, maybe for several days on end. They must have a notification, because they have other business to attend to. I got no notification, just a slip in my letter box saying that (a) they had paid me an un-announced visit, ( I had had the cheek of not knowing this by extra-sensory perception, and ( they could pay me a new visit sometime -- if I paid them SEK250:- extra.

 

When the courier finally arrived next day, I asked him about company procedures. After some initial defensiveness, he admitted that he found them as bizarre as I did. He confessed that each day, he alone had ten to fifteen parcels that private adressees were not home to receive. It was clear that it was the policy of Posten Logistik not to notify private adressees in advance. Each one of these parcels had to make the rounds twice.

 

Now, is this incompetence, or a racket? Both -- it's a racket run by incompetent racketeers. That courier alone took in some SEK2500--3750 each day extra but at little extra cost, because he made largely the same round every day in any case. That's the racket. The incompetence is that this is no way to run a sustainable business. I would advise everyone to carefully steer clear of Posten Logistik. Other courier services may be more expensive, but they don't run people's blood pressure up.

 

This is what happens when little place-holders from a public service are told to go play at Private Enterprise, but don't really know how. The result is neither service nor enterprise, but petty extortion. And yes, this is how it is to live in -- not a banana republic, but a potato monarchy.

 

The old man from the Letting-Off Steam Age

[jaapv]

Take care, Lars, you will be the guy with the heart attack, where it should be the other side. If you instruct Will how to send next time to avoid those thieves, I'm sure he'll do it

[Nicoleica]

Sorry to hear that Posten Logistik got their claws on you Lars. But one way to get your own back might be to post yourself a few cans of Sil that's very close to its exploding date, and then don't be in when they try to deliver it. (Obviously, you don't go to collect it either!)

One advantage that I have now that I'm living in The Netherlands, is that I can deliver things to Will in person, as I did last Sunday. That way the postal people only get one chance to mess things up.

[Xmas]

Hi Lars

 

I agree suggest you copy this complaint to the maintenance man he has a vesting interest in keeping his customer happy which includes sorting out the Sw postal procedures.

 

Noel

[Doc Henry]

Take care, Lars, you will be the guy with the heart attack, where it should be the other side. If you instruct Will how to send next time to avoid those thieves, I'm sure he'll do it

:)

 

 

Lars,

I had recently reception problems with UPS and for "rapid sending" it has become "normal shipment"(5 days instead 2 days) ...for a high rate .

They even said that I do not live at this address (I have a house in the city center) and the package was ready to return to sender

Henry

The man disappointed by express parcels