New courier study shows that U.S. Western States have low threshold for late deliveries

Here in San Francisco, we’ve come to regard talk about “a New York Minute” as strictly passé. Now comes news from a prominent national courier confirming what we knew all along: U.S. Pacific Rim consumers have little patience for late deliveries. 

Recent research conducted by the national courier, Dropoff suggests that consumers on the U.S. west coast and western states are far more demanding than those living elsewhere in the country.  They want it yesterday…if not sooner.

Dropoff just released the findings of its annual consumer survey on delivery and retail trends, noting that there’s a huge “expectations gap” between what products consumers want delivered same-day and what products they actually receive same-day.

The West’s biggest expectation gap was for healthcare products, including prescriptions, medication, and medical devices or supplies (53% of consumers in the West want same-day delivery for healthcare products vs. only 5% that received same-day healthcare products). They also had the highest expectations gap when looking across all 15 different product categories in the study compared to other regions in the U.S.

Furthermore, West consumers are 9.5% more likely to expect companies to have “much faster” delivery times than the previous year (46% West vs. 42% non-West). They are also 14% more likely to abandon an online purchase because of slow delivery time (58% West vs. 51% non-West).

“This marks our third annual consumer survey, and every year we find there are slight differences between what various consumer segments want and expect from their delivery experiences,” said Dropoff CEO Sean Spector in an interview.

He added that early tech adopters, for instance, are more likely to abandon an online purchase if the delivery options aren’t fast enough (60% of early tech adopters versus 51% non-early tech adopters).

“Given these differences between stand-out consumer segments, we wanted to further explore other segments that might be expecting or experiencing delivery in a unique way, too,” said Spector.

Finally, U.S. consumers in the West fared better than other regions for delivery problems (late, missing, damaged, etc.) but are still 13% more likely to have had packages go missing compared to other regions.

Now wait just a minute….