Dunelm Food Store no longer taking or sending parcels

By Daisy Rought-Oram & Hugh Ludford

As of Monday 13th October, Dunelm Food Store on New Elvet has stopped accepting and sending parcels for delivery. Speaking to Palatinate, Muminah Ali said “when it gets busy, we get around 100 parcels a day”. The issue is not just the volume of deliveries, but the fact that they go uncollected. Ali said parcels frequently remain in the shop for “days and days”, and are often “massive”, taking up lots of space on the shop floor.

She said it was mainly students’ Vinted parcels that constitute the mass of the parcels that go uncollected. “That’s the issue that we have the most”. Compared with deliveries from bigger retailers which are “packed nicely”, Vinted parcels are wrapped unprofessionally.

As well as the space being taken up in the shop from parcels going uncollected, the issue was impacting business. “We’ve become more of a parcel shop rather than what we’re actually here for”.  Dunelm began accepting and sending deliveries because “it was meant to be something to get customers in, to provide them a service”. But the parcel collection and delivery service was “taking up a lot of [the] staff’s time”, and “long queues of customers actually wanting to pay for something” were having to wait for people who would come in to drop off “loads of parcels”. 

Ali also said that some student customers using the parcel collection and drop-off service were often impolite, with “people being rude about it, [I] just don’t need it”.

UPS deliveries, however, will still be collected by the shop. These deliveries tend to “come in boxes, and are normally from retailers, not sent by people buying off of things like Depop or Vinted”. There are also far fewer UPS deliveries, and so less strain on Dunelm. “We get paid better as well, and it’s just a lot more worth it”. 

Image: Izzy Nash