Headie Aster / 07 June 2025 / Categories: City, Services, Opinions

In Post Locker Postal System Is Great Until it Is Not

Good grief could it have been anymore stressful picking up a package

I am sure everyone has seen the posting lockers popping up outside convenience stores around the country, a solution to Hermes and Evri and the posting and receiving calamity of online shopping. There’s an ongoing joke in our village, we saw the Evri guy last week so don’t expect him back for six months.

As our habits have changed, much more shopping for what we need now done online, low cost posting and delivery services have changed and developed with new players like In post offering convenient drop off and pick up lockers, providing a different solution, yet still as consumers our acceptance and tolerance of basically terrible stressful solutions, has not.

We still have to deal with not knowing if a parcel will turn up or not unless you opt for a much more expensive courier like FedEx or DPD.

About 6 months ago I started using Inpost and directing my purchases to a locker installation I have to pass on my way to and from work so very convenient for me to get an email or text telling me my parcel has arrived in the locker and to go and collect it.

The system is really easy, I pop a QR code under a scanner, a door opens, I get my parcel, close the door and press an acknowledgement to say all is well. Job done. It’s worked a charm and has become the way I receive and send everything.

That was until yesterday I hit a road block, my QR code didn’t work and when I tried to enter the six digit code that didn’t work either.

I called In Post and after speaking to someone a long way away on a terrible line I went into the convenience store where the locker installation is to try and find my parcels.

I was told they were not there but at another location around the corner.

I drove there and managed to collect two of the three parcels I was awaiting.

I only had emails for two of the three parcels so could only provide the information needed for two of my three items.

In my inpost app it said the 3rd parcel had arrived on the 4th June but had been returned to the sender on the 5th June, it was now the 6th June.

The shop keeper told me not to panic because that information was probably wrong and he would try to find it.

But with no email the code I needed for him to release the parcel I didn’t have.

I cannot believe this important code is no where to be found in the inpost app, a hundred digit tracking number sure but that’s no use when it comes to collecting from a shop.

I spent at least 30 minutes outside the shop with the parcel, the shop shopkeeper was kind enough to let me take it outside as I didn’t have the long tracking number I needed to get the six digit code I needed to get the package released.

The problem was exacerbated because the person I was speaking to was in a call centre miles away, the line was terrible and we couldn’t hear each other so it didn’t matter how pleasant and helpful the customer service person was, it was impossible to manage the phone, the parcel with the very long tracking number and remembering the six digit code I needed.

I was lucky it had a couple of double digits in it otherwise in all the commotion I’d have probably forgotten it by the time I got back into the shop.

I cannot say I’ll never use inpost again, that would mean never shopping online again so I probably will have to but it will definitely take a while for the stress of this whole experience to wane.

It was a complete nightmare, and the logical place to find the code necessary, in the app, NOT THERE, only in a text or email I never received.

Like every new high demand business they have probably out grown their locker network and transitioning to leaving parcels elsewhere without the customer knowing caused havoc for me and maybe other people too.

In post went from HERO to ZERO for me in the delivery of one parcel. No email notification, no text message to say it had actually arrived on 2nd June I later found out, why it was scheduled to be returned on 5th June and no notification the pick up location was in store not in a locker, something I’d never seen experienced before.

An experience so bad that in one fell swoop has completely put me off.