I don't know if there is something in the air, but the service from most Courier companies seems to be getting seriously awful at the moment:
This includes a next day delivery parcel that was eventual delivered 6 days late!! Apparently they had tried to deliver 3 times but had mysteriously never bothered to leave a card and in any case I work from home...

In 3 other cases parcels have been left for other people yet again the door bell never rang!!

The latest is flowers from Interflora which I was going to make them re-collect but since the address is in the same village, I will deliver as I assume it is a special occasion - probably a death in the family knowing my luck!

Anybody else having similar problems?

I'm afraid it's nothing new.

At a firm I worked, we used to send a lot of stuff to building sites using TNT.

After three attempts at one delivery, I finally took the items to site myself. I then drove the half mile or so to the TNT depot and asked the manager why none of his drivers could find the site. He was explaining that some sites are very hard to find when I pointed to the four massive cranes within site of his depot

There was a moments silence, a brief apology and I left.

Another time when I was running a lighting maintenance team, I used to have to order 20% more fluorescent tubes and other lamps, as the TNT drivers thought it was great fun to jump on the boxes of tubes and break them.

I had a huge delivery coming in and was at the depot when it arrived. I was then able to point out to the driver that fluorescent tubes are full of mercury powder..... Can't imagine why, but the level of breakages went down (for a while) after that.

I think competiton is causing them to take on too much at such low prices.

Going back to the days I worked on bikes in London we had a pride in getting everything there fast and safe. A really professional attitude, and deeply competitive with the other companies.

My most recent experience working in the office for White Arrow, they had new drivers starting every day and half of them had never done despatch work before. The pay is so low very few look at it as long term work so they have little motivation to worry about customer care or the reputation of the firm. (That rings bells with many operations nowadays...)

They went bust locally, taken over by UPS.

My interactions with most of the firms operating now suggest nothing is getting better.

You can set up to do subcontract work very easily, and it is often these fly by night operators that are messing up and causing the whole industry problems.