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

I recently bought something from a TradeMe auction, and paid immediately hoping that I would get my hands on it pretty fast. Unfortunately, the trader used Fastway Couriers (http://www.fastway.co.nz/).

Fastways have now taken two weeks to delivery a parcel from less than an hour away. This afternoon I phoned them to find out whether I could come and pick the parcel up myself, and ended up on hold for 25 minutes before being cut off. When I phoned back, I got on a IVR merry-go-round.

On Tuesday afternoon, after my last post, I managed to get through to a person. I think her name was Mary Beth. She was very apologetic and said that the parcel had taken far too long to be delivered. She promised to go down to dispatch and find out exactly where it was and then call me back. I never heard anything.

I think the Fastways company is in deep trouble. As far as I can tell, their operation seems incapable of delivering parcels on time, and in my experience, they lose 1/3 of the parcels sent with them.