Im going to disagree quite a lot.

Deutsche Bank is massively worse than any of them for society and to most customers. Vonovia is a stain on society. No doubt there are many many worse companies for various reasons than the three you listed.

Deutsche Bahn is inefficient. But I have no idea why you consider them all that terrible. Deutsche Post isnt even all that bad. Theyre one of the best companies in the public package delivery space.

I'm no longer a Deutsche Bank customer as they were so bad, so I don't know ;-)

DHL is bad because they underpay their employees so in a large city, employees will dump their packages at the first door, very annoying if you life in a large house with many flats, you have to search for the person who took the parcel - even if you're there they will not ring the bell, just dump everything.

Deutsche Post next to me you usually wait 30+ minutes in a long line (dozens of people) with the unfriendliest employees possible, it has a 1.9 (!) rating on Google.

(I have no car) Deutsche Bahn is incompetent, trains cancelled, too late, wrong car order, non working climate control, 1st class car missing, restaurant closed and much much more.

Deutsche Telekom wouldn't activate fiber for nearly a year although everything was build and finished. Computer said no, no one wanted to come and see that everything is ready (they installed everything) because the computer was in an inconsistent state (20+ calls plus a lot of escalation worked after nearly a year of me paying 99EUR/month 5G for my remote work).

> DHL is bad because they underpay their employees so in a large city

The others pay worse, then. DHL has by far the best delivery for me, closely followed by Amazon, then it’s UPS (though they are used so rarely, my samplesize is tiny), and finally DPD and GLS. Oh, and of course there is "roll the dice delivery" aka Hermes.

Oh don't get me started with Amazon, they want to deliver 20:00 to a business address.

Not an issue for me, for home deliveries they are (mostly) great for me.

I don't know how Deutsche Post ended up on this list, I've rarely had issues with them, certainly much less than with any of the private delivery services (Hermes and DPD are absolutely terrible).

When complaining about the quality of the "former state railroad", the emphasis is on "former". The Deutsche Bahn offered much better services, more efficiently and at higher reliability, when it was still state-operated.

Telekom has always been bad, of course. To be fair, some of it is due to bad regulation, but they also just seem shockingly mismanaged.

I think its not a coincidence, but rather they are/were all monopolies. Yes, technically there are minor competitors, but except for Deutsche Telekom, there is no serious competition. And Deutsche Telekom seriously exploits their copper network that was handed them for free with taxpayer money.

Deutsche Post isn't great, but in the consumer space they are vastly better than any of their competitors, both for the sender and the receiver. Compared to their competition they are a clear success story.

Here DPD is best, they give you a 2h slot several days ahead and then a 1h slot on the day of delivery.

> Here DPD is best, they give you a 2h slot several days ahead and then a 1h slot on the day of delivery.

This must be a joke! DPD (DPDgroup, or whatever) is borderline incompetent.

I'm on vacation, and I needed a laptop. It was shipped from Germany ... after sitting somewhere for days. Then no information for 4 days on their tracking site. Then more information but I never had even an approximate day they would attempt delivery (let alone a 2h slot).

Said laptop is now returning to Germany, because DPD couldn't be assed to inform me they had a local partner in the country I'm visiting, or collection points, and because their local partner (owned by DPD, so corporate separation is no excuse) didn't feel like attempting delivery more than once.

It's not like they couldn't contact me: they had my email + phone + cellphone. They just didn't try (no, there's no mail in the spam folder).

I left them message on their website multiple time - it never had any effect on the "ballad of the laptop".

I've heard it from other people before, but now that I've seen it myself, DPDgroup is so utterly efficient that in comparison even USPS is a paragon of virtue at every level.

You can say the same here in the UK about the same ex-state rail/mail/telecom and I assume basically. How to actually handle natural monopolies is an open/unsolved issue in the west I think.

immigrant to Germany here. Can you help me understand what's so bad about the deutsche bahn? I've heard transport infrastructure experts refer to the rail infrastructure here as competitive to Japan's, i.e. one of the best in the world. I have to say that's my experience too, despite some irregularities in service.

also deutsche post... what's so bad about it?

Well when I was in Japan, all trains were on time, all trains clean, all trains arrived in the correct order, all employees friendly and competent.

I'm using Deutsche Bahn for 45+ years now. Before privatization trains were on time but employees thought they are managing a prision. Since privatization there are always problems. Late (they say 5min which means 10, they say 10 which means 15, they say 15 which means 30, they say 30 - it will never arrive). Trains are dirty, lots of ICE trains are old, you're very lucky when you get a new gen 4 train. Two weeks ago they had to vacate a railway car because the air conditioning broke down - everyone had to go to another railway car in an already full train. Which was a replacement ICE, because the the train I had a reservation for was cancelled. I was very lucky to be able to make another reservation in the next train, which was very full because of the cancelled train, and people were angry because they couldn't sit although they had paid for a reservation.

And they own the tracks so do everything to kneecap the competition. Some competitors that exist are much much better (e.g. ODEG).

The also had a legal monopoly on bus travel in Germany (fell after 70 years). And did everything bus travel was as unattractive as possible so people would use trains.

They have an app where you can check in. But only if you're going alone, if you travelling as a couple, you can't check in. We tried the app for some time and thought it was an UI problem or our stupidity, when a Deutsche Bahn employee confirmed that it's not possible to check in with two people sharing a ticket in one app. You need to buy two tickets - beware if you travel with two persons. As we say in Germany, #neuland.

It's a shit experience travelling with them. Most trains don't have wifi and the reception cuts off all the time. Also many of trains are late, way more than the few competitors like Nordwest Bahn (run by a French company).

And lastly, it's way, way, way too expensive. They are seriously charging 100 € for a 2 hour trip through one state when you don't book weeks in avance.