AirTags Expose Dodgy Postal Industry (DHL Responds)

Latest updates on the Royal Mail AirTag can be seen here: twitter.com/megalagofficial

This is 100% how companies should respond to criticism

To anyone saying DHL was “bribing” him: I’m from Germany and Tours like this are very common. Throughout my whole school life I’ve visited a whole amount of companies like DHL. I learned how Newspaper was made, how Glue and tape was made, how chemicals get filled into cans, printing companies and even things like video production and prop making… it is a learning experience and very educational to see how things work. So it’s not surprising to see DHL Germany inviting him.

For a major international company to take a relatively small youtuber on a tour , answering questions and do all this is pretty cool tbh. Much respect for that.

Honestly, their response email was exemplary. They addressed how they messed up, they apologized for messing up, and they said how they were going to change to avoid messing up in the future. Every company should be like that.

This is the kind of investigative journalism our media outlets have completely abandoned

This madlad got a guided tour from DHL and studied enough things to become something close to a postal service expert just from doing a fun experiment with a couple of airtags. Huge respect.

I have to interact with large corporations sometimes and typically when somebody says "we can't share numbers" it often just means "we don't have the numbers"

To answer a couple of things about Royal Mail in particular: at least as of 2016, automatic sorting was ONLY in place for domestic letter mailings, and parcels were sorted manually. This was always explained as being due to the variable size and weight of parcels making them difficult to accurately 'face' (i.e., turn the right way round) for machine reading. As for why they keep claiming security reasons: RM's entire operation is covered by the Official Secrets Act in the UK. In theory, I think this is supposed to be to prevent employees leaking information from others' letters, but in practice they use it to be intensely opaque to scrutiny. (Citation for both of these: I worked for RM briefly in 2016, and had to sign the OSA to work there.)

I used an AirTag to help United airlines track down my own bag that was stuck somewhere near the tarmac in another city. Such an easy way to detect/call companies on their BS

Having worked at a factory, I could totally understand how missing North vs South Korea could happen, especially when one destination is WAYYY more common, but it’s cool you were able to go and see what it’s like on the floor!

I use to work for Amazon distribution in America and we did mail including for USPS, UPS, and FedEx. Everything that came into the building was scanned by the Induct crew who also printed a sortation label to it. Then sortation crew would scan it and then scan the bag it belongs to(and put it in that bag.) Then the bags got scanned to a load, the loads were scanned to a van, finally the driver would scan each package from the bag when delivering. Each time would be yet another time any error could be discovered and fixed, often finding packages that were sent to our building by mistake by induct, the PS(problem solve) team tracking errors by sorters, and even delivery drivers finding lost packages that were just tossed in a random bag by a lazy worker. Lots of manual handling, but those things got scanned at least like four times just at our building. A mishandling rate of 0.004% was our target range, though we often sat at a much higher 0.008% due to constant bad workers and the revolving door hiring to just keep enough staff available.

I like how this series started off as a test for air tags, and now it has turned into exposing the mailing industries

Worked at UPS for a few years doing the jobs you showed. It was an eye-opener. Tips for successful shipments. Printed labels or very neat large block print with a waterproof marker. Although pre-prints and bar codes are taking over as are automated systems, your sorter will do a better job if they can spot the zip and state of your package more easily. Use shipping envelopes and standardized boxes. Weird shapes or small packages will often get lost in the system. Pack it good enough that you can stand on it without damaging the box. A worker might step on it, or when loaded in a truck, it might end up at the bottom of a 10ft tall stack of boxes.

its important to keep in mind that automatic sorting companies will give you higher numbers for failure rate of manual sorting since they want to sell automatic sorters

This makes DHL look really good. They have shown professionalism and not jumped to drastic decisions like other companies would. Good job on DHL

Modern journalism is a beautiful thing when done right. Thank you for making shipping interesting.

As part of working in IT consulting I spent a couple of years on a project at DHL in Bonn. Very good company to work with and the atmosphere was pretty laid back overall. One thing that I found particularly interesting was that during the period around Christmas, employees from various parts the company would volunteer at packet sorting centers to help with the high demand. This included higher ups like project managers.

Hats off to DHL for treating a customer like this. As a German, I've never experienced such openness from them. Rather felt like I'm a nuisance to them, than a customer with a legitimate request. Oh and man, your content is interesting af 👍 guess I have a couple videos to watch.

Having worked in DHL and also the Aviation industry and with a small dab in Fintech - it's really hard to make upgrades to a system which can not have downtime - there is not enough storage space in any of the sorting centers for even 1 days worth of goods. In addition if there is a system breakdown then the volume is too big to clear and sort all the stuff manually, with a pen and paper. So we are stuck with MS-DOS looking crap, which never fails. The thing I did come to appreciate about the MS-DOS looking carp. Also it was lightning fast. Every input has an immediate reaction, no loading time, no waiting after the computer.