How delivery crisis is scuppering our Christmas shopping plans - Sarah Coles

The habits we picked up during the pandemic mean we know the joy of buying everything we need without the Christmas crowds and chaos. And because more of us spend at least part of the time working from home, we’re around for parcels to be delivered.

It was all going to be so simple. But the delivery crisis has scuppered our plans.

Royal Mail strikes on 24 and 25 November meant it was already carrying a backlog when Black Friday orders were being processed. The additional strikes on 30 November and 1 December stopped a huge number of parcels in their tracks, and there are more planned for the 9 and 10, 14 and 15, and 23 and 24 December.

As a result, it has brought forward its last postal days for Christmas to Monday 12 December for second class post and Friday 16 December for first class post.

It’s an incredibly frustrating change for everyone with presents to send, who suddenly have to accelerate their shopping schedule – and can’t even pop online in their lunch hour to get the last remaining gifts – in case they don’t show up in time to be posted out again.

In reality, things are even worse than this, because the Royal Mail has also warned that there will be delays in anything posted in the run up to each strike day, and in the aftermath of them – which essentially covers the entire period between now and Christmas.

It means anything you order, or post, via the Royal Mail, may or may not show up by the 25th.

If you have yet to buy an item you were planning to send on, it’s likely to be more reliable if you buy it as a gift and arrange to have it sent direct. Gift wrapping is likely to add to your costs, but you may consider it a price worth paying for the item to reach them on time.

If you’ve already bought something and want to send it, you can consider using a tracked Royal Mail service, which it says it’s prioritising at the moment.

Or you can try an alternative courier. As well as the big names like DPD and DHL, there are discount courier companies like ParcelHero and My Parcel Delivery, who buy slots with a number of delivery firms at a knock-down price and sell them on.

Unfortunately, while the problems are particularly striking for Royal Mail, other companies face their share of issues too. Last month Citizens Advice published its annual league table of delivery firms, and not one company scored more than three out of five.

Yodel took last place: an impressive 43 per cent of people said they’d had a problem with their most recent Yodel delivery. Ironically Royal Mail took the top spot at that stage.

The vast array of potential delivery problems this Christmas mean it’s worth knowing what your rights are if something goes wrong.

If a parcel hasn’t shown up, rather than going to the delivery company, your first port of call is the retailer.

They have a duty to get the items to you within whatever time frame is agreed. If it is late, you can return the item for a full refund.

Some companies are making it clear there will be delays to their usual delivery times, so you may have to wait.

If the website didn’t give you a time frame, it should be no later than 30 days from the date you bought it, so they may tell you to hang on for delivery.

If this is going to be too late for Christmas, you still have the option to return it when it finally arrives, and buy an alternative. Consumer Contract regulations mean you have two weeks to do this from the moment you receive it: there doesn’t need to be anything wrong with the item in question.

If it has been left somewhere you didn’t approve, in a communal area that could be accessed by others or with a neighbour you haven’t specified, and it goes missing, it’s the duty of the seller to either resend or to refund the purchase.

They’re not always quick to offer this, so it pays to remind them of their consumer duty. Unfortunately, if it is stolen from the ‘safe place’ you specified, it’s considered to be your responsibility, so there’s nothing you can do.

If it arrives broken or incomplete, then you have the right to return it immediately for a refund or a replacement. If you hang onto it without opening it, they may argue that you accepted the parcel as in good order, so it’s always worth checking everything as soon as it arrives.

Unfortunately, while you should eventually get the item or a refund in most cases, the vast majority of solutions involve you having to buy an alternative gift yourself before Christmas.

It means an awful lot of us will be forced to brave the shopping frenzy in the dying days before December the 25th - alongside everyone else rushing to replace gifts stuck in the postal system.

We’ll need to brace ourselves for the kind of horrible Christmas Eve mayhem we specifically went online to avoid in the first place.

It’s also been revealed that the cost of a traditional Christmas dinner for four is up by almost 10 per cent on last year to £31 despite grocery price inflation dipping for the first time in 21 months.

Groceries are still 14.6 per cent more expensive than they were a year ago but this is down from last month’s 14.7 per cent in a sign that the pace of inflation is easing slightly, according to Kantar.

House prices fall

In November, Halifax figures shows that prices fell 2.3 per cent in a month, to an average of £285,579. This is the third consecutive month of falls, and the largest since the financial crisis in 2008.

We’re not yet in the realms of annual price falls, but if this pace continues, it won’t be long until we are.

What’s even more worrying is that it takes around three months for a sale to move from being agreed to being completed, so these figures reflect sellers’ decisions in August – before the disastrous mini-budget. It means that buyers were already getting cold feet before Kwasi Kwarteng’s announcement forced mortgage rates through the roof.

Since then, the fallout from the mini-budget mayhem has been a catastrophic loss in confidence.

Even though mortgage rates are starting to fall back from the peaks, we’re still seeing sales fall through, and new buyers give up the ghost.

RICS figures revealed that buyer demand is sliding, and lower mortgage approval figures from the Bank of England show that it’s unlikely to bounce back in the short term.

Market confidence has plummeted, and nobody is in a hurry to buy in a falling market.

The fact we’re highly likely to be in a recession is only going to make people less confident about splashing out on a new home. So as bad as these figures are, things could get even worse as we go into 2023.

Sarah Coles is a senior personal finance analyst and podcast host for Switch Your Money on Hargreaves Lansdown