You know what, Fedex?
If UPS would run an ad saying, we don’t do singing animals and sustainability — we just get your package there on time at a lower cost, I’ll use you every effing time. Unfortunately, I had to get something somewhere after three on Saturday by Monday, and only Fedex could do it.
Think about it.
It’s price, efficiency and reliabilty that is dictating your motives?
YOU MUST BE A FASCIST!!!!!
Well here in Australia if I want to get something somewhere by Monday and it is after 3pm Saturday the only way is to drive there myself or fire up the bug smasher and fly it there.
UPS used to be pretty dependable. But then we ordered some stuff around Valentine’s Day. It was days late and the packaging beat up. I felt bad asking the merchant to replace the item when I had evidence that it was the shipping company. Unfortunately, it was my only recourse. We did tell the company to drop UPS and go with Fedex. Now if only Amazon would do the same.
I just wish the FedEx ground guy would knock on the fucking door and not drop the package and run like hell!
Where I live, UPS does the exact same thing. The difference is on my routing, FedEx delivers around 2-3pm and UPS 5-6pm. I typically don’t hold it against either as one benefit to UPS’s late delivery is I’m sure to be home rather than having my package sit at my front door for hours.
Air or ground service? That makes all the difference in the world. Or at least, it did a few years ago. Next-day and second-day packages took a different route through the handling system from ground packages. I’m not sure if that’s still the case.
Ground. Air would come earlier.
I did customer service for UPS one winter when I was a kid in Tucson (they use a call service center there.) The saddest call was from somebody expecting a wedding dress that wasn’t going to arrive (or too late to matter.) We got a lot of those.
It turns out, in various odd places in the country, UPS has these lost package centers about the size of a football field stacked with packages that are never going to arrive anywhere. Astounding. I expect some of the other delivery services have something similar.
Last year, I had a mid-sized printing job done by a printer in Dallas. I would have driven down to the plant to pick them up, but since it was in their contract and didn’t cost anything extra, the printer offered to send them by UPS two-day service. I was pretty busy getting ready for a conference, so I agreed.
UPS defines “two-day service” as *air* service. So, every 2-day package has to take an airplane flight They drove the packages to the airport and flew them all the way from Dallas to their national hub in Kentucky, just so they could fly them *back* to Dallas. Unfortunately, the packages arrived in Kentucky at the same time the big ice storm hit Dallas and closed the airport. So, 2-day service became 4-day service. For a delivery distance of less than 20 miles.
Now, consider what this means. The number of people sending 2-day packages from one part of the DFW area to another may be small, but it is certainly greater than one. Over the course of a year, it probably amounts to enough packages to fill an entire airplane. And the same thing is undoubtedly happening in other cities as well.
I’m shocked at the size of your carbon footprint!
The other day I had Fedex deliver an important package. I also had several things to do around the house. I left a note on the door that I might be in the back. The door was open and the gate was physically open.
At one point I came into the house and found a notice that they could not deliver the package.
It was taped on the storm door right next to the notice that I night be in the back yard.
I haven’t used FedEx since they delivered a package intended for me to an address down the road where somebody signed for it. The sender (a family member) couldn’t get a refund because they said they had a signature which proved it had been delivered. Basically, they said she was lying. I received the package from the person who had signed for it about a month later, when it no longer mattered.
That was a couple of decades ago. Literally tons of lost business, FedEx. Suck on it.
I had UPS do that to me once, with an Overnight Package that I needed for a service call. I used to get around 10 or 12 packages a week, all through UPS.
But this one was ‘overnight’ so it wasn’t my usual driver.
I was in their system, the package had my address, and phone number on the label. My employer had a corporate account, and obviously THAT meant another phone number they could have called.
The ‘overnight’ delivery driver couldn’t find my road on his map, so he dug out a phone book, found another guy with the same name (my real last name has an unusual spelling) and upon finding THAT guy, he delivered the package to THAT Mr. Der Schtumpy.
My boss and I spent most of the day on the phone trying to figure out where the part was, because it was tracked out as Delivered EARLY. When UPS finally tracked down the driver, he called me to tell me where I could pick up the part. And needing said part badly, I had to go get it. Unfortunately, that other Mr Der Schtumpy’s wife had put it in the house when she went home for lunch.
My customer didn’t get his machine fixed, I lost a whole day of productivity, my company had to fight to get their money back and the P/T idjit who delivered it to the wrong house, and ultimately that driver became the Routing Manager for FedEx in our area.
Sad but true.
(we found out he was the route mngr when my son did a FedEx Christmas job YEARS after the overnight fiasco)
Yeah, I realized that was the flaw in my vendetta – the other guys likely would have done the same. Still, with things as they are where they probably drive customers in equal proportion to their competitor, maybe one will finally realize they can get a bigger share of the disgruntled if they develop better means of verifying that their packages got to the right place.
And, maybe I will sprout wings and fly today.