Because picking a delivery slot imposes a constraint which creates a cost for the delivery provider.

> Everybody has jobs. Everybody finds it annoying to buy something on line. You never know when it's going to turn up. You have to take a day off, and hope your driver is competent at his job.

Most everybody has jobs, but most people I know don't find it annoying to buy stuff online; many people can have packages delivered to work, and many people have no problems with packages delivered to their home when they aren't there.

> Why can't you just say "I'll be at home on Thursday after 5pm. Call me on #555-333-9999 if you have any issues". Courier delivers the package after 5pm on Thursday.

Because, as you note, everyone has jobs, and if there was no cost to request delivery times, pretty much everyone would request something like "after 5pm". Which would eliminate the freedom of delivery companies to efficiently use delivery vehicles. Which would drive up their costs.

Asking for something which imposes an additional constraint on the service provider which has a cost to fulfill either costs everyone extra to subsidize you, or must cost you extra.

At present ( in the UK ) most courier delivery fleets stand idle in the evening after being out during the day missing deliveries to people who are in work. And having to call again the next day.

It perplexes me why they don't shift their delivery period six hours later to start at 15:00 and end at 21:00. That would cover both business and residential hours.

I would imagine that is because the highest margins are made off of next-day deliveries from business to business. They often guarantee these deliveries by 10 AM because many companies are willing to pay extra to ensure that their package is delivered by 10 AM.

Consumers, by contrast, are more interested in paying as little as possible for shipping. Shifting their delivery hours to accommodate a group of customers who aren't willing to pay extra for the service while simultaneously killing off business from their most profitable customers would likely be a poor business decision.

Maybe they feel that even people doing delivery jobs are entitled to be home with their family at the end of the day?

More to the point, maybe they feel that the higher wage costs for that kind of shift work aren't worth whatever cost savings in other areas it would provide.

So yeah, adding a second shift isn't unheard of. My grandpa worked second shift his whole life, and I worked third shift the whole way through college.

They would have to split the fleet, all business deliveries still need to be made 9-5.

Amazon have actually started doing this in reverse in the UK, you can set an address as a business address and your package should only be delivered 9-5. In practice the 'Amazon Logistics' drivers (the aforementioned blokes in cars) are terrible and rarely manage to get this right.

Before I graduated high school, I lived in rural-ish area where the nearest commercial couriers were 50+ minutes from my house to the north and about 90+ minutes to the south. Wal-Mart was literally my only choice for consumer goods, so I spent a good chunk of change online.

I always had the same driver for a certain courier. I asked him how often he had to come down that far, and if it was significantly out of the way compared to the rest of his route. He told me that there were occasionally other stops in my town, but it wasn't the norm. The city and the immediate suburbs were the vast majority of their deliveries. Driving 100 minutes round trip for a couple deliveries probably sucked.

Apart from that it's a good idea.

This is also an opportunity waiting to happen.

If you're picking a more specific delivery window then you're throwing off that planning and it likely requires the delivery driver to take a less efficient route than they otherwise would. That costs the company, and therefore it costs you.

  "Everybody has jobs"

And my mailbox is a slot in the door. It's not going to accept my packages for me.

This is godsend for people who work standard hours. I buy on-line quite often, and whenever (90% of cases) there's an option, I pick up a paczkomat on my route home (big cities have a lot of them; mine has something around 50). If a particular shop doesn't offer this type of delivery, I order it to work.

Sadly, post office is no longer an option for me - they work standard hours, and only during Monday - Friday, which makes it hard to pick up anything there. In other words, I have to come late every time something big from Aliexpress comes.

EDIT:

> What I don't understand, is why I can't pick my delivery slot for free.

s/free/a fee/, and I think it could work. For large enough values of "a fee".

    0. http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=amb_link_366591722_2?encoding=UTF8&node=6442600011

Slightly offtopic rant

Amazon offered my universities students union the chance to install some inside the union (e.g. to help students who are at lectures during the day/don't trust flatmates etc), however the union council (who are elected to serve the students interest) voted with a majority against the idea because of how little corporate tax Amazon pays. Ironically, the students union website is hosted on AWS, but they're able to overlook that.

http://dailyweb.pl/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Paczkomat-InPo...

As well as the logistical issue others have mentioned: if they did/do offer such an option, you value the option so they'll expect you to pay for it (unless it becomes part of a race to the bottom with other distributors in which case eventually someone will offer that for free).

> after 5pm

That would definitely be chargeable. If evening deliveries were offered for free the majority of their customers would pick that.

> Call me on #555-333-9999 if you have any issues

Not going to happen: the delivery people work to pretty tight schedules in order to be as efficient as possible (and therefore cheap in terms of both man time and fuel). Taking time out to try get through to someone won't happen. You could be on another call, your phone might not be contactable for some other reason, and so forth. In circumstances where you are not ready and waiting to collect you are not unlikely to be in a position to not be able to immediately answer the phone.

Of course, there shouldn't be any logistical impediments preventing the delivery company from notifying you once a more precise delivery window is known.

To my mind, their system far outstrips the other couriers.

Now add customer preferences and you have a mess that can't be satisfied because everyone wants their parcel 5-7pm.

If everyone wants later delivery, maybe that is something to look into (to meet/satisfy customer demand). Instead of the alternative of packages not getting delivered in the daytime and trying again the next day.

Amazon do have their lockers. The problem with Amazon Lockers is that they're expensive. Even with prime it still costs extra on top (similar to one day shipping) to have it delivered to a locker.

I've noticed Amazon require a signature a lot LESS often now which does reduce this problem (since it can be left), and I guess Amazon are picking up the cost of the 1-5% of stolen packages.

PS - I've only had a single package in the last two years simply disappear (after it transitioned from a carrier to the USPO, it was a packet of underwear).

Or a combination of Amazon and the logistics companies. Mind you it's very safe to drop things at my house. (Rural home with a long driveway.) But I've noticed a trend toward a signature requirement becoming very rare whether it's Amazon or others.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/r6yB77e.png