Since I moved into my new home in August 2021 I had been getting amazon packages for a company and wasn’t sure why they were coming to my address. But my initial research of the company name showed it was the previous people that lived here before me that was operating a business from this address.

At first, I had thought the couple have moved to Wales, they did initially, but they returned to the same area I live in, they effectively moved around the corner to a bigger house. So, I found them and had a chat about these amazon packages. It turns out they have been operating an Amazon store on the platform and the packages I get are part of the returns system. Somewhere in amazon’s great big computer network there seems to be an error with addressing and these returns that I get.

It’s now 2023 and this morning two more packages came through my letter box. I really was fed-up with phoning Amazon, their system is so poor. Spoken to Philippines, Jamaica, this time I got on the train and went to their head office in London.

After near to 40 minutes of waiting in reception I finally spoke to a guy from security! I gave him a report about my situation. They didn’t even have a customer service representative to deal with me. I noticed a few things in the head office there, like other big companies they operate security through another company, Securitas AB. They appear to operate full time staff and contractors (cheaper staff).

I was also asked and was told that they get seven to eight people a week coming in through the door reporting similar instances of these problems. That’s equivalent of 416 people a year just in London coming in through the door. If like me they have received over 60 unneeded packages a year, that’s 24,960 packages sent wrongly a year. 

Amazon are firing staff, but it seems to be to save money it might be wiser to sort out these problems with the displacement. 25,000 packages could equate to a loss to Amazon of £125,000 just in England. If you want to have a guess at a worldwide figure of loss to Amazon, the numbers tell me that Amazon are losing £2.5 to £3 million plus through these system errors.

The company is worth billions, even still, that’s a big loss and the small end.