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Big DPD test at Team Wallraff44 percent breakage rate! Is throwing packages in depots to blame for the damage?
What a shambles!
The Wallraff team will send 50 packages with cups, glasses and wine bottles all over Germany for five weeks with the parcel service provider DPD. In 22 of them – or 44 percent – shards are formed. Why does so much break? Several undercover operations show where the handling of customers' property apparently leaves a lot to be desired.
This is how Team Wallraff checks package security when shipping with DPD
In January 2026, Team Wallraff will start the experiment: advised by packaging expert Niels Wildner, five light and five heavier packages will be filled with glasses, cups and wine bottles – in such a way that the fragile contents will not be damaged under normal circumstances. So with plenty of bubble wrap and packing paper in all the cavities to keep everything at a distance.
What else is in the packages: special impact indicators. “If the indicator is red, it means that this package was mishandled too much, was thrown too hard, was pushed too hard,” explains Wildner. In addition, all packages contain GPS trackers that also react to falls and impacts, including exact position and time information.
Six RTL reporters across Germany are supposed to unpack the packages upon receipt, check for damage, replace anything that is broken and then send the whole thing to each other again and again – a total of 50 times over five weeks.
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The result: What happens in the parcel depots?
Extremely hectic drivers, packages that are not delivered even though the delivery vehicle is already on the road and someone is waiting at home all the time, and apps that fail – these are not the only problems that Team Wallraff encountered when shipping with DPD.
At “Team Wallraff” reporter Alex Römer’s home in Berlin, all of the packages arrived undamaged. But that was rather the exception: In a total of 50 shipments, the sensors registered 74 knocks or falls, and the recipients unpacked shards in 22 of the packages. This corresponds to a damage rate of 44 percent. Of a total of 550 cups and glasses sent, 64 fell by the wayside. At least all the wine bottles remained intact.
In 82 percent of the shocks and falls in the test, they were not recorded on the go, but in the depots. This is where the expert suspects that most of the damage occurs in the test packages: “A lot of packages come together in the depots. They have to be unloaded from the cars within a very short time, routed, and reloaded into the cars again. This is the biggest risk that happens on these transport routes. So wherever manual intervention is carried out, this is a typical result.” But what exactly is it?
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“Sometimes the packages come from somewhere”
According to the general terms and conditions, a DPD parcel should be packed in such a way that it can withstand drops of approx. 80 centimeters. However, what the undercover operations in various depots show raises doubts as to whether the height of the fall is always limited to this distance – and not just during peak times such as shortly before Christmas.
“We constantly experienced packages being thrown around somehow,” explains reporter Alex Römer when evaluating the results. During his undercover assignment at a DPD subcontractor, he tells a colleague that apparently no one really handles the packages with care. “Sometimes the packages come from somewhere,” he replies. “But the thing is, some of them are heavy. You can't take everything into account. It's too tiring. It's also hard on your back.”
Günter Wallraff remembers that it was no different during his own undercover assignment for a parcel service 14 years ago: “I experienced it myself. It's not just a joke. When you're carrying hundreds of packages a day, sometimes there's a heavy package that can fall down, or to save time you throw it to someone or onto the conveyor belt. That's in the nature of things. You can't attribute that to the individual driver.”
DPD does not comment on these research results in detail and writes: “The satisfaction of our customers is the basis of our business model. We therefore naturally investigate any indications of possible quality defects.”
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