Be glad you don’t live in Boston. If FedEx misses you, your package can go to any of three possible locations. One of them is about an hour drive away and shares facility space with what I can only assume is the location where Harmony Korine goes to get his ideas. There’s really no way to be certain of which location it went to without calling them, since the card they leave doesn’t really specify.
I have a house, and I have this problem with FedEx. UPS, DHL, USPS and everyone else will both ring the bell and knock loudly, but the FedEx guy won’t ring the bell and barely taps on the door.
One time I was literally sitting behind the front door waiting when I heard a light tap. I got up and opened the door to see the FedEx guy walking away with my package and a tag stuck to the door. I believe I yelled, “Hey fuckwad! Aren’t you going to knock?” He said something like, “I did.” which lead to a shouting match because, you know, he didn’t, not really.
Another time, since I hadn’t been sitting behind the door, I missed him, called up the FedEx office and bitched and escalated until they decided to drive the truck back out and deliver my package at 10pm.
Now, whenever I know it is FedEx delivering, I try leave a sign on the door that says, “Ring the bell AND knock loudly.” The lame part is that if I forget the sign, he just taps and runs away, and it’s the same driver every single time. I even know his name, so when I call FedEx I can say, “Hi, driver [first and last name] didn’t ring the bell again, please send him back with my package.” And when the guy comes to the house at 10pm he’s all pissed off and practically throwing my box at me and I just say, “If you had actually knocked early you wouldn’t be here now.” and he always replies with something like “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” I’m sure he calls me an asshole and such after he gets back in his truck, but I don’t care because I’m not the one not doing his job.
There really is no other solution. Drivers have an absurd schedule and will shave a few seconds of each delivery any way they can, but they are forced to wait for the shipping clerks and receptionists of the world to verify and sign for the packages. Ship it to work.
I’m torn on the whole “leaving packages” thing. It’s more convenient, but I’m always afraid that someone’s gonna steal it.
See, this is exactly the kind of shit job behavior I’m talking about in the OP. They have less than zero regard for the customer because they’re getting paid either way and there’s practically nothing we as consumers can do to address that. The fact that you have the same guy pulling the same shit over and over tells me that no matter how many times you complain, they don’t do anything to remedy this behavior. It’s utterly appalling and any retail business that had to pay for its fuckups would’ve fixed it by now.
I honestly don’t understand why we aren’t entitled to refunds on our shipping charges. If I pay $20 to get something shipped overnight and I don’t receive it because the driver never knocked, I should get my money back.
If it’s a “Signature Required on Delivery” thing, and you have signed the waiver for Fedex/UPS, then yeah, that’s on you. If it’s not Signature Required, though, and they leave it, then I’m pretty sure it is on them. Certainly any reputable vendor is going to side with you and take up a complaint with the the carrier, if the carrier shows it as delivered with no signature but you say you never got it.
That is why I specifically hate Fedex. With UPS, if you have to go to the depot, you go to their depot. It’s usually located in a reasonably convenient place, it’s customer-facing, and they have a normal process for picking up undelivered packages.
Fedex, on the other hand, contracts out with carnies for half their deliveries, so you end up going to some random office on the service drive of an airport, a place that’s still got its original 1973 decor and a guy smoking at his desk who will grudgingly shout to the back for someone to see if they have your package. (This is only a slight exaggeration of an actual experience in Milwaukee.)
And even if they don’t let the carnies handle it, half their facilities are ridiculously non-customer-friendly. One time (I think this was for an Xbox repair delivery) I had to pick it up at a Fedex place where the front door was locked, and I had to walk in through the truck door and a dude there directed me down random office hallways to some lady in a regular office, who managed to get my package from a back room somewhere. It was freakish and weird, and it seemed like they had never done this before in their lives.
Combine that with how hard it is to even get them to agree to hold the package (UPS lets you just type the doortag into their website, Fedex makes it a weird convoluted process) and how they are seemingly never willing to just leave stuff on the porch like UPS, and the result is that shipping Fedex is like punching me in the face.
True, but I’d rather avoid the hassle altogether. My credit card will refund any charges made on a stolen/lost card, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna be careless with it.
I by far prefer UPS/FedEx to the USPS, but yes, even UPS and FedEx can be annoying.
As I discovered this morning, when I tracked an Amazon package meant for delivery before Christmas (i.e. the 22nd or 23rd).
Just so we’re clear, Amazon specifically said that if I ordered by the date that I did, I would get it in time for Christmas. I even ordered a day or two before the actual deadline.
So what happened?
December 20 - Shipment received by carrier in Tempe, AZ.
December 21 - Departure scan from Tempe, AZ.
December 21 - Arrival Scan in Phoenix, AZ.
December 21 - Departure scan from Phoenix, AZ.
December 23 - Arrival scan in Louisville, KY.
I live in the upper midwest. Why would this thing be going to Louisville, KY? Further, UPS’s own page says estimated delivery on December 23. I’ve had enough experience with UPS to know that they have never received a package in city and delivered it to me on the same day, meaning that it’s pretty certain I’m not getting this thing until after Christmas. So now I get to tell my kids that Santa is late.
I’m not ranting. I know in the grand scheme of things that it is a minor annoyance. It’s just that the Christmas holiday (and being promised receipt before that) ups the aggravation factor.
I’m also sure that the UPS guys are probably pretty bleary eyed right now with the package increase, so I have some sympathy for them. Still just irritating.
Back when I lived in San Francisco, I once had something ship to me from Los Angeles by way of Memphis.
Needless to say, it was a little late.
They have a massive sorting station there. Why? I dunno, probably cheaper that way.
http://money.howstuffworks.com/ups.htm:
…If their destination is more than 200 miles away, the packages will travel by air – less than 200 miles, and they go by truck…Once the containers are loaded on the plane, the plane carries them to Worldport – the UPS Global Operations Center – in Louisville, Kentucky. Worldport is where the sort happens…
If its Fedex, they have a similar complex at Memphis.
The dickish behavior of the deliverymen? I asked UPS guy who regularly deliver to where I work about residential deliveries. His response was a grimace and head shaking. Is the behavior you describe excusable? Hell, no. But yeah, they’re miserable too.
You guys are dicks. The answer is, “you can’t.”
I don’t bother dealing with the delivery companies at all. I didn’t pay them anything, they’re not working for me. I paid a shop money to get items to my house. If the retailer doesn’t get the package there when they promised to, I call them and e-mail them. Tell them they’ve cost me a day of work or university, and tell them a specific time I will be available to receive the package at my convenience. And that they can either arrange that for me or I’ll be cancelling my order. And if they refuse to cancel the order I’ll take it up with the credit card company.
The only people who haven’t played ball with this was Dell. And it wasn’t over a purchase it was over a repair. They had arranged for a pick up of the broken computer, the delivery man never came. They tried a second time, he never came. At this point a replacement PC came that wasn’t specced as good as our original broken one. We demanded a proper replacement and had pickup arranged for both PCs we now had. The delivery guys missed two pickups. A second replacement PC arrived, again not specced correctly. At this point we demanded our money back and told them they could take all their PCs back and we would never deal with them again. They refused to give us our money back until they received the PCs back. We refused to send the PCs back until they refunded our money. That was four years ago, we still have the three PCs sitting around the house. All because a business dealt with a crappy delivery company.
Amazon has started using a wonderful new service named OnTrac which is actually worse than UPS or Fedex by several orders of magnitude. I had no idea they even existed until I had to deal with them on my latest ‘two day’ shipping order from Amazon.
If you send Amazon customer service a strongly-worded complaint about the delivery company they’re using, they’ll stop using it on future shipments to you. Worked for me when they started shipping via A-1 Courier or something in Chicago, resulting in me never getting packages because they never bothered to buzz the door or try to redeliver and forcing me to drive to their pickup location in the back of a warehouse in a shitty part of town.
That’s hardly an excuse, though. An explanation, maybe. An excuse, nope, sorry.
How so?
It’s worth a shot.
I think Fedex SmartPort takes the cake. I order stuff from Woot, that’s how they ship, and what I gather is that SmartPost is some combinations of Fedex + USPS that results 50% of the worst combination of both, with both parties just blaming each other.
Someone online watched their package go back and forth past them about 5 times once.
If it’s an air shipment (typically 3-day or less), UPS and Fedex route through central hubs. Sounds like the UPS hub is in Louisville. So you’ll see huge streams of planes incoming early in the day and leaving late in the day.
So there’s actually a chance it will arrive on the 24th, if it’s routed through the central hub on the 23rd.
Ground shipments use a more standard routing algorithm.