I'm old enough to remember when FedEx gave pretty good service. I think I might actually have done better with the U.S. mail on this one.
No service
I'm slowly learning to use an iPad instead of a laptop, but it ain't easy. I foolishly left my laptop behind in my hotel last Thursday at the end of a trip to South Padre for required annual Commissioner training hours. I spent the first day and a half trying to get movement out of somnolent hotel employees who don't seem quite to grasp the potential for tips--it's safer to live on salary and go by the book. When I finally got my laptop into the hands of FedEx Friday afternoon, the fun really started. It was supposed to go by overnight, guaranteed delivery by 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, but for some reason they put it on a plane to Memphis, where it sat for many hours. Then it went to Ft. Worth, then to San Antonio early Sunday morning. The holiday weekend shut it all down, so there it remains. In theory it will go to Corpus Christi tomorrow morning (Tuesday) and be trucked out to my house sometime later. All this for a four-hour drive from South Texas to Rockport.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
14 comments:
Sorry to hear of your difficulties, but it sounds like it will work out soon.
Yeah, package delivery sucks now. We had a package that made it to Greenville SC, about 50 miles from our house. Next we checked, it had gone to Boston, then to Tallahassee, through Atlanta and finally to us, about two weeks later than promised. This was through the USPS.
Stop denigrating the USPS. US Mail is quite good. Delivery times are competitive with FedEx, and it is much cheaper. More important, US Mail is much more reliable than FedEx. Also, you have legal protections with US Mail that no delivery service can offer.
From personal experience, UPS is much better than FedEx
I fear that I am not in a position to stop denigrating the U.S. postal system.
We got 7 or 8 inches of rain just before dawn. Nevertheless, it looks as though my laptop may arrive this afternoon. We’ll see!
At the moment, all the major parcel delivery services are having problems. USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL . . . I certainly understand international shipping being loused up, because of quarantine rules among other things, but intra-national shipping is also off-kilter. And not in predictable ways, either, at least not in my recent experience.
(DHL was loathed by students at Flat State U, but that had to do with their drivers hitting pedestrians in on-campus cross-walks rather than actual delivery service. Two bump-n-runs in two weeks does not make anyone popular.)
LittleRed1
You must be a postal worker. No offense meant.
USPS is a big outfit and just like large companies in the private sphere, workplace culture/effectiveness starts at the management level. Poor management often means poor service.
FedEx might very reasonably have declined to accept an overnight contract, and offered instead to deliver on the first business day after the holiday weekend. I question the decision to send my parcel from Harlingen to Memphis to Fort Worth to San Antonio to Corpus to Rockport. I suspect it was just a mistake, for which they could have owned up instead of continuing to insist that I could expect delivery as originally promised until after the promised hour passed, after which they still insisted it would arrive by "the end of the day"--on Saturday. Only on Sunday morning did they begin to say they could not give an estimate of the actual delivery time. No matter how difficult business conditions are, there's never a good reason to lie.
However, my laptop did arrive yesterday afternoon, in a box that was not battered in any way, and in the middle of moderate flood conditions.
On AVI's recco, I ordered a book about six weeks ago. The USPS would deliver within 7-10 days of shipment.
The tracking worked well--from CO to middle TN, and after a fortnight and more of waiting we reported to the seller, who sent another copy by . . . not USPS. May have been FedEx.
Anyway, I got that one within a week. A few days ago USPS delivered the first one.
Can't escape entropy.
Cousin Eddie
You just never know about the USPS. Sometimes it works brilliantly, but other times the package goes somewhere to die, and there's really no way to look into it. Last Christmas it got really crazy with anything that had to go through Philadelphia. There was some kind of uproar, which my sister confidently ascribed to the evil Trump postmaster, who was trying to destroy the system, something about the mail-sorting machines.
With FedEx, it used to be possible to look into a lost or misdirected parcel. This last week, whether it was because of the holiday or because FedEx has "improved" its operations, they were desperate to dump me into the automated website tracking system, and to avoid letting me find out how to get a human being to talk to. In addition, of course, if I could get a human being, all he was allowed to do was read explanations off of a card, which had nothing to do with the actual situation. None of the ones I reached had strong English or any notion of where various U.S. cities were.
On the other hand, I reached two different tech support people yesterday and today about an email issue, and both were outstanding: precise, knowledgeable, patient, smart, and able to solve my problem despite seemingly unreasonable hurdles posed by their employer/client. So it's possible it's not the end of civilization.
I have tea coming to the Texas Panhandle from New Mexico. It went to Memphis, TN first, then Lubbock, and should get here tomorrow. FedEx. *shrug* Gotta love the hub and spoke system.
LittleRed1
I don't get a lot from FedEx, but the other private carriers seem good. USPS often delivers to the wrong house (or attempts to- they have a gate so they don't, then message me they couldn't- I have no gate), and they literally broke a heavy cardboard mailing tube in two, damaging the metal rail inside. When I took it to the local Post Office to help the senders insurance claim (I wonder how many don't bother? They seem surprised I was doing this at the P.O.), the supervisor literally told me "of course it got broken, it's too long" ?!? I informed her I already received the replacement unbroken. No further comment from her.
One more anecdote to add to the mix.
I've been trying to do business with Barnes & Noble for the last several months, since Amazon has started committing censorship. Sadly, B&N's "UPS Mail Innovations" process is as bad as any shipping function I've seen. All the books I've ordered move slowly through the function until they get to the local transfer point for handover to the USPS (apparently, in Carrollton for Plano). There, it spends several days, according to B&N's tracking function, apparently waiting for USPS to come get it, rather than UPS trotting it, and all the other locally-destined packages, over to the USPS' sorting and shipping facility.
Once it's in USPS hands, though, delivery to my house has been very prompt.
UPS' shipping for other sellers has been inconsistent, but never this routinely bad.
USPS performance may be franchise related, to the extent the local POs are truly franchises.
Eric Hines
As I alluded to above, it boils down to management, which in each particular post office is the Post Master.
Our closest one had an idiot for Post Master at one time. I'd drive 14 miles to another post office just so I didn't have to deal with him. Once he retired and a new Post Master was assigned, that post office became a lot better and more customer friendly.
Post a Comment