Of course Hermeanies are mean. They are utterly and extremely mean. Their whole culture is oppressive and of miserly penny pinching. Their whole emphasis is to ensure that all the rounds are taken out and they will bully, cajole and threaten people to take them out. Local field managers are measured on their ability to get the rounds out and are vilified over any rounds that fail to go out.

No rise in basic parcel rate

Couriers who have been working for Hermeanies for 10 or 12 years report that their pay has not gone up during that time. They pay per parcel delivered and the basic parcel rate has not gone up over this time.  Meanwhile, Hermeanies profits have gone up massively year on year. They tripled profit the three years leading up to 2015 according to certain sources.

Investing in technology and not people

Hermeanies state like Amazoon that they are investing massively in technology to improve their efficiency. Improving efficiency or in other words improving profits appears to be their mantra. This drives their managers to seek out efficiency savings in their own spheres of responsibility. What you or I might call penny-pinching. This nasty penny pinching is often done at the expense of couriers. They are a disposable commodity and little or nothing appears to be invested in them. This nasty culture is not unique to Hermeanies as other companies are similar.

It’s a mistake for Hermeanies not to invest more into couriers

First impressions of Hermeanies for new couriers is often appallingly poor normally resulting in new recruits leaving within days. I suspect that the majority of new recruits don’t even last three weeks. Hermeanies don’t have a formal training programme or induction programme for new couriers. This is clearly a costly mistake as they are forever recruiting and losing staff really quickly. A lot of pressure is being placed upon their Field Managers who are the first port of call for couriers. They cover for each other for when they are off duty. When our manager is off all the covering managers often appear to be overwhelmingly abrupt, rude and oppressive when we call them on the telephone.

Hermeanies Couriers are often poor. In order to make a living they often work long hours and take on other jobs to supplement their income. On starting out with Hermeanies it can take ages to get to know your way around. Often you will be covering other couriers. Once allocated a route it might take a really long time to deliver all the parcels on the route at first.   However, Couriers do speed up as they get to know the people on their route which can improve their hourly rate.

The wear and tear on couriers’ cars can be huge. And of course couriers are responsible for this.

Sally one of couriers down at the depot is a lovely lady.  She has frizzy hair that flies all over the place but is sometimes contained under a wonderful, colourful woolly hat that looks like a knitted tea-cosy.  She loves jangly ear-rings. Most frequently she has a couple of colourful little fishes or parrots dangling below her ears.

People mistake Sally the courier as being a dippy neighbour

Sally is a lovely hippy type of person but she really is dappy. She looks nothing like a red capped DNP courier and customers often assume that she must be a neighbour bringing a mislaid parcel round as opposed to a courier. Sally is a loud driver over revving her old banger of a car whilst slipping the clutch. The stress of delivering and manoeuvring around tight streets has caused scratches, scrapes and dents all over her car. There is a very unsightly dent in her rear from reversing into a metal fence hidden in a bush.

Sally’s car is no advert for Hermeanies

Sally’s vehicle with dents all over it, is unsightly and not a very good advert for Hermeanies. The constant rubbing of her tyres against the kerbs has worn them out.  All those three-point turns resulted in her having to have a new streering rack which cost her over £1,000 pounds to fix.  She then needed new brakes and drums which cost her another £700. She also has to change her clutch at least every year which must be about another £300. All that kerbing is causing her to have frequent changes of tyres.

Sally is trapped working for Hermeanies to pay off her garage bills.

Poor Sally is now having to deliver extra parcels in order to pay off her hefty garage bills on her credit card. You need to deliver a lot of parcels to raise £2,000. At a rough guess, she needs to deliver, at least 4,000 or 5,000 providing she has no more breakdowns.  She is now trapped in her job working to pay off her car bills.                       

Could Hermeanies really be so mean?

Di Davies who is a lovely chap got the sack when his rusty old van was stolen , along with   lots of Hermeanies parcels. Di has 8 children to feed and has had to go to the local food bank in order to get by.  Meanwhile the delivery rounds that he used to do have gone to pot as no-one knows his difficult rounds like he does. A huge backlog of parcels is mounting up back at the depot ans his customers are becoming upset.

Hermeanies charge you money to sort out their awful machines. 

Hermeanies hand-held machines are really unreliable. There are allsorts of problems with their machines. However, Hermeanies have the audacity to charge you when you call their technical support desk on your mobiles.  The calls seem really expensive and I get the impression that they make additional money  by deliberately putting calls on hold and playing ghastly music  at you.   This is so bad for your blood pressure.

CEO Calamity Woodpecker

After the Christmas chaos of 2015/16, CEO Calamity Woodpecker proudly announced that the old chunky 1980’s delboy type hand held machine was being disbanded, to be replaced with a new super fast all singing and dancing slimline machine.  We were told that we would all be getting the new machines by the summer.  However, as spring approached rumours abounded of terrible teething problems with the new machine and appalling software issues. Hermeanies made plenty of additional income resulting from people having to call the technical support help desk. There were rumours that the computer manager was made to walk the plank.

It looks like the new machine is slowly coming in and people are saying that it is faster than the old chunky one.  However, there is a significant problem with the new machine , as unlike the old one it does not give you a summary of all the different types of parcels that you are delivering. Hermeanies pay different rates for the differing sizes of parcels. This used to be set out for you but it is now much more difficult to check up upon what you are being paid for.

Complex and confusing pay

Hermeanies pay different rates for different sizes of parcels, if parcels are to be signed for and different rates for different rounds. They pay small bonuses for speed of service and for parcels delivered within time targets. Hermeanies have a very complicated system to calculate Sunday pay rates.  Basically they undertake to pay you a minimum sum of  £10 per round up your money to £10 if you don’t have £10 worth of parcels to deliver.  To make it even more confusing Next contribute a small sum towards your top-up. The other issue is that you must deliver at least 80% of your parcels to achieve the top-up. But Hermeanies sabotage this by giving you parcels destined for businesses that are closed on Sundays.  It feels like they are deliberately chucking several business parcels in so as to sabotage your bonus.  Even when you deliver 100%, it is really hard to determine if you have been paid your Sunday top up and when they haven’t done it properly it is really hard  to persuade them that they are in the wrong.  Grrr.

Rumours abound that Hermeanies make deliberate mistakes in order to boost their profits.

Almost every-one you speak to down at the depot reports to  having had problems with their pay.    They all state that they have not been paid for something or other and all find it really hard to get Hermeanies to admit that they have made a mistake.  When you contact the support line the help desk people tend to skillfully deflect any blame back onto you or absolve themselves by telling you to contact your field team manager.  But so many people down at the depot seem to have unresolved issues.  Sally although dappy has been hitting all her time targets but did not get her time target bonus last month.  Him with the bow legs old Ronnie says that he hasn’t been paid for a whole number of collections that he’s done. Zelda who does a window cleaning business as well as her delivery round has been trying to get them to stop taking her business insurance deductions  over a year.  It has really frustrated her as she has made requests lots of times but they just keep ignoring her.

Di Davies is really angry as not only did he get the sack , but he says he is missing two days pay from his final pay.  Whoever, you speak to who has ever done work on a Sunday , thinks they have been short changed in their pay.  There are so many instances of people thinking that their pay is wrong that people are left thinking that Hermeanies  are really incompetent or that they deliberately make mistakes to boost their profits. And people are left feeling unable to deal with them..

Hermeanies were so penny pinching to Sally over the Christmas period.

To help cope with greater numbers of parcels Hermeanies created new rounds by taking streets off existing rounds.  And so Sally had Blackberry Way and Bramble Hill taken off her.  Hermeanies then reduced the parcel rate on the new round by 10p per parcel. However, no new courier was ever put in place for the new round and Sally was required to keep delivering Blackberry Way and Bramble Hill.  But she was doing them at 10p per parcel less than she did previously.  And so for every 10 parcels she delivered she was taking a £1.00 pay cut and Hermeanies were making an extra £1.00 profit.

Now that the Christmas rush is over the sub-depot is now opening later.

The sub-depot used to open at 8.00am and is now opening at 10am  The reason for this is that Hermeanies have cut their costs by sending the bulk of the parcels later to the depot.  local couriers are upset as this is inconveniencing them and upsetting their work routines sometimes involving other jobs.

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