Two further high-street retailers have been dragged into the row over the penalties applied for untimely deliveries at retailers’ DCs.

Last month, MT reported on fines of up to £1,000 being applied by Kingfisher group companies B&Q and Screwfix to firms supplying them for arrivals at their DCs outside of a fixed delivery window. Such penalties have led to considerable pressure on truck operators to justify untimely deliveries to customers and, in some cases, to pay for the fines themselves.

It has now emerged that both Boots and Sports Direct apply similar fines to suppliers.

Sports Direct has been named by two vehicle operators: one is a Fors-accredited logistics company, which suggested in an email seen by MT that Sports Direct was applying fines of £1,000 per late delivery at its Mansfield DC; the other told us Sports Direct applied fines for both untimely deliveries and any failure to present pallets with the barcodes correctly oriented.

“They’ll hand out a fine of £1,000 for everything that’s wrong with the pallet,” a source said.

Boots, meanwhile, has been named as another firm handing out penalties for late arrivals by Jayne Masters, sales director of Miniclipper Logistics – winner of the partnership award in the Motor Transport Awards 2013 and one of the two operators that originally told us about the practices at B&Q and Screwfix.

Masters said her firm had experienced only occasional problems with Boots, but that one had resulted in a £1,000 fine.

Spokewomen for both Boots and Sports Direct declined to discuss their penalty arrangements, the level of fines applied, the circumstances, or the total amount generated each year.

The Boots vendor manual, however, confirms that where deliveries arrive on site more than two hours after the booking without the warehouse being notified, it can “result in claims for compensation to cover additional costs incurred within the Boots supply chain”.

  • MT would like to hear from operators or suppliers experiencing similar problems with retailers. Please email chris.druce@roadtransport.com or call 020 8912 2158.

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