Yodel: a quick follow-up

We blogged back in February about Yodel, telling the story of how they got a customer (my sister) to travel to their depot for no reason and then refused to reimburse her travel costs.

If anything new happens with a story, I do try to write a follow-up, not least because otherwise all the posts on this blog would be just moaning with no closure. But this follow-up was delayed, chiefly because it took me ages to get round to it.

Anyway: Yodel still refused to reimburse the customer’s travel costs, possibly because they don’t want to set a precedent. But they did send her a £10 voucher (something like this) which can be spent in various places.

A commenter did suggest taking Yodel to the small claims court, and this would be an interesting thing to try if you’ve got the time and energy, but my sister decided that’s she’s made her point and got a token of apology, so she doesn’t want to take this any further.

In more exciting news: The Restless Consumer has had some attention from the mainstream media. A researcher for Channel 4’s Dispatches phoned us wanting to speak to the person who had the bad experience with Yodel. We gave her my sister's phone number (with her permission) and I offered to talk to them myself too. But that’s kind of where the story ends because they didn’t interview her after all.

This seems to be a “thing” with TV researchers; they put out scattergun requests and they feel no obligation to say "thanks, but no thanks" to people who turn out to be no use to them. You’d think someone doing research for a consumer-rights documentary would realise that politeness costs nothing.