It can be done right. I'm told that here (ie Japan) you can arrange a delivery to within a specified one hour timeslot...

Of course, I don't know whether you can do this for deliveries from companies, where they're paying the delivery company rather than you, but I'd hope that since they have a system for hour timeslots you ought at least to be able to upgrade by talking to the delivery company...

(In the UK my solution to this is to have everything delivered to the office, since that's guaranteed to accept parcels during all business hours...)