Some delicious soup
For Christmas last year my brothers bought me the new Rick Stein book Far Eastern Odyssey. It’s a great book full of recipes from Mr Stein’s travels in the East. I cast my eye over mouthwatering recipes for Thai chicken soup and Massaman curry and I couldn’t wait to get cooking. I needed shrimp paste and I needed it fast.
The Ross-shire town of Dingwall boasts award winning butchers, a fruit shop and bakeries, but as yet no international food store. So, I had to do my exotic ingredient shopping online. I spent about three quarters of an hour looking up ingredients on one of the websites recommended in the book, adding spices and dried food suffs to my basket. I could almost taste my spicy soup.
Then I went to the checkout and was aghast to find that because I live in Dingwall it was going to cost me about £20 to deliver a parcel which probably weighed no more than a packet of Monster Munch. I did the same on another website to find the same ridiculous delivery charges applied. This got me riled.
Of course it’s not the first time I’ve gone through the rigmarole of buying something online to find at the last stage that because I live in the remote wilderness that is Ross-shire it will cost me four times as much to get it delivered.
And I’m not the only one to get annoyed about being charged a huge surcharge because you live in the Highlands. There have been a couple of petitions about the issue, and it’s come up on the Scottish National Rural Network’s discussion forum, too.
So I was delighted to see Consumer Focus Scotland’s recent briefing paper to parcel operators. The key recommendations are better direct communication between parcel operator and the customer and the need to increase alternative delivery methods. Consumer Focus Scotland recognise that while issues of parcel delivery affect consumers right across the UK, the issues are worse for those in rural Scotland.
They say that clearer information should be provided at the point of sale on delivery charges, that customers should have a choice of parcel operators – including Royal Mail, and that surcharges should be kept as low as possible to avoid penalising people in rural and remote areas.
I couldn’t agree more and I hope that the parcel operators and online retailers take heed of the recommendations. You can download Parcel deliveries: Current Practice and Possible Solutions from the SNRN website documents library and read more about the briefing paper in Parcel delivery recommendations made.
And in the end I did get my shrimp paste and dried bird’s eye chillies, from an online retailer with the good sense to use Royal Mail to make their deliveries!
