Delivered to an empty house

Two attempts, then the box goes back.

That is the standing rule on most courier contracts in the region, and from about the middle of June it starts to bite. Failed deliveries climb through a Gulf summer on almost every direct-to-consumer account I have looked at, and they climb for a reason no system has a field for. The address is correct. The customer is not in the country.

The parcel goes to the villa on file. The gate is locked, the phone rings in a house nobody is in, the driver returns the next day and finds the same silence, and the order goes back to a warehouse that now has to unpack it, inspect it and put it on a shelf in the month when demand for it is at its lowest.

Then the customer, who is in London or Cairo or on the coast for the summer, receives a message saying the delivery could not be completed. They did not fail to be home. Nobody asked them where they would be, so they never said.

What they take from it is not a logistics fact. They take a small piece of evidence that this brand does not manage things well, and they take it in July, with time on their hands. The refund is processed correctly and the trust goes anyway.

The address on file is where a customer lives. It is not where the customer is, and for eight or nine weeks a year those are different places for a large share of a Gulf brand's customers. Every checkout in the region asks for a building, a street and a phone number. None of them asks the one question that would have paid for itself twice over by August.