Thank you very much for sharing these insights.

It is interesting to see that this happens not only in Europe, and in Switzerland, but also in many other countries.

Buying online was and still is sometimes an obstacle course. It started that the largest online groceries had to introduce virtual queues for accessing the online shop. Their systems could not proceed with all the requests. There had been times where the waiting time was over one hour. One has felt like in the queue of a call center.

When the queuing time was over, one had 10 minutes to start the shopping. Ok, when started, one could shop as long as you wanted.

When all orders have been done, you were looking for the next available delivery date. Unfortunately, all dates within the next 14 days, i.e., all the available dates published, have already been fully booked.

I found then out that at midnight, they are always adding a new day and started to access the shop before midnight. Many other customers had the same idea, and the queuing time was rarely less than 45 minutes around midnight. Also, all dates and times to pick up the orders at the next store have been sold out.

Few hours before delivery, you are getting a notification that they cannot deliver all ordered groceries because they do not have them anymore in stock. It’s always a bit a surprise what you get and what not.

Neither the IT systems nor the delivery system has been renewed over all the years and is now causing a lot of troubles.

On top of that, the official post services announced that they have too many parcels to proceed and no resources to do that, such that they put restrictions in place on how many boxes they will deliver per large online shops.

You can think about something like “we will only proceed 5000 parcels for Amazon per day” — great…

And all the other orders are somewhere in the queue. The fact is that the post-service has reduced the workforce over all the last years and has contracted workers on an hourly basis with unfavorable conditions. That was done for cost-saving reasons, and now, they cannot guarantee anymore the ground services, which is stated in the law.

For comparison: the surgical masks I had ordered in China and were delivered by an express delivery service, needed only half of the time, than my groceries. And then they are complaining that all the people are ordering on the Amazons and Alibabas of this world.

I fully understand the extraordinary situation. And I fully understand when a lot is not working as in ordinary times. But what I cannot understand is, that they are complaining about their competitors that can deliver and why the people are ordering there, instead of focusing on their processes and services.