I need an after-hours courier service

I understand that the entire Courier industry evolved to support the needs of businesses for quick communication, but what about consumers?

A lot of the things I purchase on the web are couriered to me. Invariably, this means that they try to deliver it to me during the day, when I am at work. There are a number of possible solutions to this problem, let's examine them.

Option One: Stay home.

Now, I am quite lucky in that I have a job with reasonably flexible work hours, and so this is sometimes an option for me. However, the courier companies don't make this easy, refusing to guarantee delivery at all, much less a time window or even a day. I don't need to know the time to the minute, but if they could narrow it down to say a 3 hour block, it would be much easier to arrange to be home for it. I have in the past spent an entire day at home waiting for something to be delivered, and have it not show up at all. And most working people probably wouldn't have this option at all, since couriers only work standard business hours.

Option Two: Have it delivered to my workplace.

For some people, this might not be a problem, but in a lot of places, taking care of personal business at work is often frowned upon. And sometimes, let's be honest, you don't really want all your workmates and boss to know you are buying something from 'The Hair Clinic', or 'Kinky Lingerie R Us'. It's just not their business. And this is assuming that the courier company is willing to come to your place of business. I work for a University, and I have had couriers refuse to deliver there. Admittedly, it can often be quite hard to find buildings and offices on the campus, but they must lose a lot of business if that is a standard policy. Ironically, the first time that happened, the item that was being delivered was my degree certificate, sent from that same university. Eventually I asked them to just return it to sender, and then walked across the campus and picked it up from the graduation office.

Option Three: Reschedule.

This isn't really another option, since it really just means you get to choose either of the above two options and try again. The same problems still apply.

Option Four: Come and get it

The other option they give you is to come and pick it up yourself from their depot. Now, putting aside the irony of going to pick something up from the people who are supposed to deliver it to you, their depot is usually only open until 6pm or so. If you are a standard 9-5 worker, you may be able to make it, depending on your proximity to their depot and the traffic situation that day. If you use public transport to get home, you probably won't make it (unless you live very close to their depot). If you are lucky, your friendly courier company will be open for about 3 hours on Saturday morning. Now, depending on your usual habits, this may mean you forego your normal sleep-in to drive halfway across town and wait for 20 minutes while the (one) warehouse guy hunts through all the packages to find yours. Of course, if you are unlucky, they won't even hold the package for you until the weekend, but will send it back to the source after a couple of days.

So what can we do instead?

Given the problems that courier delivery poses to your average full-time worker/occasional internet-shopper, surely someone can come up with something better? Someone needs to start up an after-hours courier delivery service, with deliveries between, say, 6pm and 9pm or anytime on Saturdays. The target market for such a service would be people who work full-time and buy things online. This doesn't sound like a huge market, but if you think about all the people who buy things from auction sites, it starts looking a bit bigger. I'm not saying a company who did this would dominate the market, but I think there's enough value to be added for a niche courier company to do quite well. I for one, would be queueing up to use their service.