Long route to Scotland

FOREVER21

I have just returned a parcel to Amazon using their collect+ service I took the parcel to my local collection point in Newcastle, and went on line to track it.
It had been taken to a depo, in Gateshead thenI was amazed to find it had then been sent to Gatwick, this seems odd as the Amazon returns label shows address as Dunfermline in Scotland.
I wonder if it will go further South before it begins its journey back North again.
Talk about wasting energy, oh well rant over, at least I did not have to pay for the return.

Exile_geordie

Or it may have been put on the wrong truck by accident.

browneyedbazzi

These things often seem bonkers when you are looking at a single parcel, but if you look at the entire delivery network and all the parcels involved then the route is probably the most economical - companies like amazon use quite sophisticated software to work out their logistics.

It may well be that there are relatively few items that need to get sent to Dumferline, so rather than send vehicles up there from all around the country with a few items on each it is more economical to send the parcels down to a hub at Gatwick (using lorries that were going that way anyhow and are fuller) where they can be brought together and sent up to Dunfermline. Big operations look at what provides economy for the system as a whole rather than individual items.

w211

Depends on where the hub is. I used to work for a courier company in Slough, and all the London parcels were sent to a hub in Birmingham, before coming back down again. As mentioned, it's probably more cost effective to send the few parcels going to London up to Birmingham, where it will join all the other London-bound parcels from all over the country, for them to be all put together in one delivery the next morning, rather than taking a few items from Slough to London direct.

Gemma__3

It might have been sent to Amazon in Gatwick. As far as I know HDNL/Yodel (Collect+) Have their main hubs in Shaw and Droitwich

Money-Saving-King

We have no idea how this delivery system works, It's all about logistics. It might seem like a waste of energy to send something to Gatwick first but unless an initial mistake has been made it has more than likely been sent to Gatwick with tens of thousands of other things which will waste a lot less energy than say driving a van to Scotland with only a couple of things in a many times over.

molerat

A few of my Amazon orders have come from Dunfermline thinking the short journey north would not take long only to watch it journey south hundreds of miles into England and back again.