It's interesting that the author picked the home depot delivery as an example, because I don't think it was caused by software bugs at all.
The delivery notifications right at the end of the delivery slot happened because the driver has an unrealistic schedule, and to hit their metrics, they will mark deliveries as "delivered" rather than missing an assigned delivery slot.
And that the expensive two-man-handling and delivery to the apartment service got "lost" between seller and subcontractor is more likely cost optimization and banking on most customers not complaining hard enough to actually force them to provide the paid-for service. "Software bug" being a convenient excuse the subcontractor can give to the rightfully enraged customer.
The reason I tend to think it's a software bug is that it seems that the system to dispatch deliveries is automated. The subcontractors get their orders from some kind of computerized system, it seems. That system seems to systematically fail to specify when they are to carry items indoors/upstairs. Whether that's due to negligence or intentional malfeasance, don't know.
What I do know from experience is that there are numerous bugs on their website, besides the "unknown error" problem I've listed. It just seems like really shittily built software... So I would tend to think there's an issue with really poor software engineering practices at that company.
I loved your article. You might consider joining the Handmade Network [0] and related conferences that I run [1] because this is precisely the sort of behavior we want to curb in our industry.
The delivery notifications right at the end of the delivery slot happened because the driver has an unrealistic schedule, and to hit their metrics, they will mark deliveries as "delivered" rather than missing an assigned delivery slot.
And that the expensive two-man-handling and delivery to the apartment service got "lost" between seller and subcontractor is more likely cost optimization and banking on most customers not complaining hard enough to actually force them to provide the paid-for service. "Software bug" being a convenient excuse the subcontractor can give to the rightfully enraged customer.