Dispensing boxes, wherever you look. The first cities taxed companies for them

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The Czech Republic is a superpower of dispensing boxes. The network of multi-colored lockers, where you can pick up a parcel at any time of the day or night, already has over 7,000 tin boxes. Zásilkovna has the most, followed by Alza and PPL.

According to Miloš Malaník, director of DPD CR, there will soon be nowhere to put the boxes. Companies fight for practically every free meter of land. “Parcel companies have teams that look for the two or three square meters on the streets where the self-service box could be placed. It leads to the fact that there will be boxes for parcels everywhere, but the parcels will not go into them,” the director alludes to the weaker performance of Czech e-commerce last year.

The company DPD is trying to catch up with the pan-European trend of delivery outside the home through rapid expansion. The package can currently be delivered to one of its 270 self-service delivery boxes, or to 1,700 Alzaboxes, and it also has a network of 4,700 partner stores where it is also possible to pick up the package.

The number of clients who pick up away from home is growing. This year, DPD therefore wants to install 500 to 600 new vending machines. “We aim for about 6,500 delivery points by the end of the year, before the season,” says the head of the company in an interview for Agenda Seznam Zpráv.

The boom in delivery, which is convenient and cheap for clients, but is starting to bother some cities. “If someone offered me that I could place several parcel machines in front of my house, on my property, I would say no. Visual smog in cities is and will be. I think that there will probably be some regulation of how those places should look,” says Miloš Malaník.

The first municipalities are trying to slow the boom of self-service delivery through fees. In addition to renting public space from companies, they also began collecting a “dispensing box tax”. “For example, in Ostrava. You pay for the rent of that space plus some tax and investment in the outlet. But we have to pay for it, because now there is a hunt for that coverage, we are part of it,” says Malaník.

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So far, however, most e-shop clients choose delivery to their home address in the first place. Especially in small towns, many of them ask couriers for non-standard delivery. When they are not at home, they ask to leave the package just in front of the front door, in the bushes, behind the trash cans. The hiding places tend to be different. But this method of delivery is prohibited according to DPD rules. Any losses would have to be covered by the courier.

“I spent the day with a courier in the villages around Kutná Hora. And requests for this delivery were very frequent. She had a very close relationship with customers, they call her by name and tell her “Dani, leave it on the terrace again. Maybe there’s not so much stealing in the villages, people are closer to each other,” Malaník describes his recent experience from the TV series Nova Utajeny sěf, where he disguised himself as a part-time worker and observed what was going on in “his” company.

However, non-standard delivery “to the terrace” will soon be legal. “We decide that the client and the courier can confirm electronically where the shipment will be left, the courier will still take pictures of it in his scanner. It is already in test mode,” said Malaník, adding that the new product will be in operation by the summer.

The big four delivery companies Česká pošta, Zásilkovna, PPL and DPD, which share the local market roughly equally, fought for every client last year, according to Miloš Malaník. “Czech e-commerce was declining, last year we grew in terms of the number of transported shipments, so we went a little against the trend. However, it was a very difficult year, it was a fight for every package, for every customer. Nobody wanted to lose,” he stated in the Agenda.

Due to the fierce competition, transport practically did not increase in price. “AND when in fact the cumulative inflation was almost 25 percent in the two years after covid, price increases were de facto a forbidden word. Now we have to react to it, but we are happy even for a few percent. Some customers react to any attempt to raise prices by carriers by calling for tenders,” Malaník refers to large e-shops.

The share of cheap Chinese parcels is growing significantly every year. Chinese e-shops push carriers to the lowest possible prices. “We try to resist it and do not accept shipments at any cost. We don’t drive for Tema, for example. We drive at prices that still make sense to us, and what doesn’t make sense to us anymore is driven by someone else, but sometimes we shake our heads as to why they do it,” wonders Malaník.

Agenda