These drivers are treated like shit. There is a reason why things are the way they are. I didn’t get my package right away, but it’s okay, because eventually I did and they just left it. They’re asked to do much for way too little. Remember, it’s the fuckers at the top that cause all of our problems. Don’t blame the help.
I mean thats cool and all but somebody has to deliver the packages. It’s not the recipient’s fault the job sucks, the recipient paid for delivery with an expected time of reciept. Entering gate codes is part of the job, ringing doorbells and actually waiting for someone to answer is part of the job, actually stopping at the goddamn address and getting the package out of the truck and going up to the door with it is part of the job. If they have unreasonable expectations placed on them, that’s between them and their manager. I fail to see what it has to do with me or my package. I had FedEx leave notes on my door THREE consecutive times saying “we could not deliver your package because ‘the business is closed.’” It was a residential address, and the package contained critical medical equipment. Mofo had those slips ready so he could cut and run without looking for the package.
They won’t deliver FedEx Ground packages to my workplace because it takes too long. Only next day or other priority levels are delivered.
I mean, I agree. But also is it not just more work for them to bring the package back to the facility? If they would just leave the damn package they could save us both from more work!
I don’t think it’d be more work for them, since they presumably have to go back to the facility anyway.
Sometimes they’ll leave it at a secondary pickup location, so it’s at least an additional stop for them then.
What i don’t get is that amazon deliveries have a date they tell me. I usually don’t need it right now so whatever, i just need to be able to intercept it sometime that day. It will flag as being delivered. But its not out side “oh sometimes they will mark a package as delivered but it will take up to 48 hours to arrive” ok, i get that traffic, and overburdening the driver’s is a constant. But fuck, don’t mark it as here. And i am talking to amazon. They know it’s a problem, just let me know there is a delay, so i don’t go rummaging through my bushes, or canvassing my neighbors!
The only problem I have with FedEx is that they routinely bait and switch me with delivery dates. Something will ship on Wednesday. I’ll check the tracking on Thursday and it will say that it’s coming Tuesday. Cool. On Sunday, they’ll email me and say the package is going to be delivered on Monday. Then Monday comes and goes and the package is never on the truck for delivery and then they’ll say it’s delayed and coming Tuesday. Like why are you making yourself look bad? Don’t tell me it’s coming a day early just to then fuck that up. You’re going out of your way to piss me off at that point.
UPS on the other hand will just tell me a package is coming on Tuesday and low and behold, there it is on the delivery truck on Tuesday.
They claimed my package was delivered and it was nowhere to be found. I followed up and they just sent back the delivery confirmation. Said it was dropped off at a reception desk. My place didn’t have a reception desk. Their CS went nowhere.
I ended up making a BBB complaint and whadooyaknow, I get a call from a supervisor at the local DC informing me that the package was actually delivered to a hotel two blocks away and they would retrieve it and redeliver it for me and apologizing for it taking so long. I had already gotten a reship from the vendor in the meantime. (Bonus, I ended up with twice the product)
I’ve had recent problems with FedEx like this as well. Like 3 of the past 4 deliveries it says it’s going to deliver maybe a day early, then just fucking sits in the depo in the city ALL DAY while still saying it’s going to be delivered today, until it’s the end of the day and it switches to tomorrow.
It’s like the packages get to the last mile warehouse a day early, so the system says “it’s here, let’s send it a day early”. Then some idiot in either the warehouse or on the truck sees the package and says “oh this wasn’t scheduled to be delivered till tomorrow? Fuck that, it’s not going on the truck till tomorrow”
Happened so many times for me with FedEx now, I just disregard any updates they send.
FedEx is the worst of all. USPS is the best. At least where I’ve lived.
I was in an sketchy apartment years ago waiting for hours for a FedEx package that needed signed. I waited the whole time in the living room by the front door. Eventually I got frustrated and walked outside. The FedEx person had snuck up my creaky stairs and put that fucking sticker on my door instead of even bothering to bring up the package and knock.
USPS has always been great with two exceptions. They once broke a jar of apple butter and once lost a thing of cookies I shipped overnight for a month and they came back to me. They were scary.
That’s out of hundreds of packages, so I love USPS.
It’s not even that. It happens before it’s even at the last warehouse. I know to disregard it but at the same time, if I have a phone coming from Google that I requested signature for delivery, I can’t roll the dice. I’ll move work from home days just to be annoyed again.
I want to know more about the monkey test
Honestly I prefer usps now… I worked as a driver for FedEx express and when I helped on the belt with packages the loaders would say fragile is French and I don’t understand French while rolling the packages.
Yeah my boy worked for UPS and said he saw dudes bounce pass TVs in the warehouse.
I used to work at a factory that made exercise equipment and the rule was once it’s out the door it’s not our problem so we’re like drop kicking packages into the truck and just cramming in as much as we can. That’s just the culture in some workplaces and a lot of these companies are really just cutting corners everywhere and the morale is low. The factory was built in the middle of the city, but the area surrounding it was a historic neighborhood, and it was kind of low income. And they would just run trucks through that area that were overloaded by a lot, and no one cared. I’m not talking about boxes of Amazon goods. I’m talking about solid-ass steel. This destroyed the streets. I mean, if they’re hiring people and firing people, you know, who’s going to take the job seriously? It Is an absolute fucking shit show out there. It was a very unsafe workplace and you know, I like tried to organize some workers and they retaliated, the people at the top that is, by messing around with my forklift. I almost crashed into racking and the metal, because it was metal above. Plates of metal could have came through my cage and killed me. We’ve gone back in time. I mean, we have got such a toxic culture for example at some of these amazon warehouses, where you’ve got people coming in with guns killing each other. But then if you’re a hard worker, you still get treated like shit, and you gotta go through turnstiles like your a fucking criminal. The workplace is incredibly unsafe and there are things that most people who work a desk job don’t understand. I always punch upwards.
I just worked a freelance job where we had six guys up on lifts 30 to 50 feet up in unsafe wind conditions with no safety gear beyond hi vis vest. I hear you.
Thought fragile was Italian. Frah-jee-lee.
Heard that too. Lol
Once Fedex lost a gait trainer to help my disabled daughter learn to walk. They then fought me for 6 months to stonewall me on getting reimbursed. When I was finally going to get my money back (it was quite expensive), it shows up at my house broken and now my daughter was too big for it anyway. I did find a local therapy center that said they could use some of for parts for their other trainers at least, but I was out nearly a month’s pay. Fuck Fedex forever.
They “lost” a $1300 computer monitor I was returning because it had multiple dead pixels. Tracking was weird, there was a “delivery exception” and it showed up 3 days later than originally expected.
Monitor company said the box arrived empty.
FedEx wouldn’t even talk to me about it because I wasn’t the one who ordered the shipping, Monitor company was. Monitor company accused me of sending them the empty box, routing me to their fraud department, unwilling to act as an intermediary to FedEx.
Had to dispute the charge with my credit card to get it resolved, a process that took about 4 months. Thank god for AmEx.
Having handled RMA disputes in a previous job if FedEx shows a delivery exception we’d generally trust that it was FedEx’s fuckup. Glad you could get it sorted one way or another but that really freaking sucks
Yeah these guys outsourced all their CS reps to India, so trying to get through to someone helpful was like talking to a brick wall.
At least now there’s 2 companies I know to never again use.
You didn’t do the needful. It’s a really important part of the process.
Sorry, I’m not racist against Indians (in fact my partner on that job is Indian and I like him) but I got micromanaged in my last freelance job by Asheesh from AT&T and I hate that fucking guy. Sitting on his ass in Mumbai telling us to work faster on a 13 hour shift.
I mean, the people they hired are probably jackasses, but not all of them. And it’s really the management that’s the issue.
In my neighborhood, they misdeliver a package at least 2 times a week.
I’ll see the FB group, so and so, your package is at my house or does anyone recognise this porch
They never fuck up my house, but man do they fuck up the rest of the hood.
Cheap labor equals cheap results.
Lmao, this still ain’t gonna work. I swear it’s like they can’t read or see the world around them.
Narrator: they did not deliver the package.
I cannot impress upon you all how much I loathe FedEx. I feel like they go out of their way to mess things up.
FedEx lost a $500k case of equipment for the service techs who maintain the instruments we use at work. They work nationwide and have two of these cases for the entire country, they keep thousands of labs running. FedEx just… lost it. Eventually it was found a few weeks later or something. The cost is not really a big deal, it is basically just instrument components they use to verify the running components, but they’re the components that all instruments are compared to, so they can’t just put together another case as it suits them. There’s extra testing that goes in to make sure these components are exactly to spec.
It is usually a driver who has too many packages or doesn’t care, both cases are an issue with the company itself.
Yep know a guy at FedEx and they leave those notes when the package never made it to the truck but they have a contract to deliver in a certain time frame. So they put the blame on the customer as a strategy of cooking the metrics.
I had a FedEx driver the other day tell me that they separate packages into multiple deliveries sometimes even though they’re all being dropped off all at once for the same reason. Cook the metrics so it looks like they’re making more deliveries in a certain timeframe.
Uni Uni likes to use “act of God” as the reason for failed delivery LOL
That explains a lot actually.
USPS does that shit here, too. They mark stuff "Delivered"and only bring it 2-3 days later. Cooking the metrics, I assume.
That’s really unusual for USPS. You didn’t mean UPS?
Nope. All the downvotes wont make my mail carrier suck any less. USPS around here is terrible for packages. Mailbox stuff is fine.
I’ve lived in several different areas of my city, and even moved to a different county and lived in three different places in the new county. Unless I have beat the odds and gotten the same driver each time I’ve been unlucky to use fedex (usually not by choice), I’d lean more toward it’s a company problem and the drivers are merely a symptom (or victim).
Anecdotally, I’ve never heard horror stories about FedEx like I’ve heard about Amazon, and yet Amazon still does a decent job with deliveries; not perfect, but orders of magnitude better than FedEx. That tells me how much worse it must be to work at FedEx.
I worked for FedEx for a year and a half almost 20 years ago.
Shower doors were called rain sticks because they all sounded like it and we’d just send the box on. If it was leaking glass, we’d tape it up first. Aquarium fish got liquified after the box spilled and the bag broke on the fast belt. Saw gallons of bull semen spilled once. “Human tissue” spilled from “poorly” taped coolers a few times. Lots of broken golf clubs. All kinds of shit just lost from broken/crushed/mangled boxes. I know it got pocketed by a few people if no one was looking and small enough. Heck, I know a person who mysteriously had 3 broken iPod packages in a single shift. There was an angry dude that used to stomp on expensive shit like dell boxes for shits and giggles.
And that was a decent job … We had a 20hr/wk guaranteed minimum and full benefits.
It’s amazing the difference a union makes for customer satisfaction isn’t it?
Note: USPS & UPS are both unionized.
UPS - Union, drivers are the MOST senior positions and get about 150k salary (I think they’re hourly? With really really really good holiday and OT) with great benefits (afaik). Everything is insured, and drivers are generally held to incredibly high standards.
FedEx - ground delivery drivers are not union. They aren’t even employees. They’re independent contractors so that FedEx can save money with MINIMAL liability. Drivers own their own route and trucks, and have to pay for everything. It’s basically a mini franchise and you do not make very much, there are no benefits.
These companies are NOT the same at all.
There was a woman in her late 30s in one of my college classes back in 1999. She was a driver for UPS, and had nearly 20 years worth stock options. UPS went public that year, and her stock options were converted to Class A common stock. She decided to hang onto her shares. I found out a couple of years ago that she signed up for a DRIP (Dividend Reinvestment Plan), and will retire a millionaire.
How are they salary and hourly at the same time? Those are opposites.
I see you’ve never heard of salaried non-exempt.
Which is, grosely oversimplified, a guaranteed 40 hours of pay with an hourly rate attached for overtime pay.
Fixed it
I had no idea about FedEx! Whenever someone sends us a package via FedEx, it’s always delayed 1-2 days from the delivery date, regardless of the service level. This explains a lot.
This. FedEx drivers get wrung, squeezed and micromanaged every second of every day. Pay someone a living wage, set reasonable expectations, and stand back. The job will get done right the first time.
More times than not they have faked deliveries for me. Sit beside door all day, no knock, no ring, nothing. Then look outside and there’s a we missed you slip
Motherfucker literally snuck up my stairs to put that on my apartment door when I was inside waiting for hours.
My fed ex people like to put my big/heavy packages right in front of my glass door that very obviously opens out and not in, which blocks my ability to open the door. 😡
I’ve never thought about that as being a vulnerability of storm doors. I guess you’d better leave it propped open on days when you’re expecting a package.
(If it’s not a storm door — i.e. if it doesn’t have another door behind it — IMO whoever installed it fucked up.)
It never occurred to me that they are called storm doors. Thanks!
Eh that’s not specific to fedex. Mostly seems to be regional; all the carriers do that shit somewhere
Not USPS in my experience.
Ditto, only seen it with fedex
Still better than OnTrac somehow.
FedEx is so bad that if they’re the only shipping option for an online order, I go and find a different vendor.
It depends on the driver really. The guy on our route is great. The one for my mom is the worst.
With USPS and UPS it doesn’t depend on the driver, they all get the job done and do so safely. Meanwhile I’ve almost been killed on my bike by FedEx drivers multiple times. Has never happened around UPS and USPS trucks. I once watched a FedEx driver pull up in front of my apartment and literally locked eyes with the guy before he pulled away again and my tracking updated to “package undeliverable”. They’re over-worked, under-paid, under-trained, and it shows.
You’re right but I’d like to add that UPS warehouse workers get fucked so bad. So they fuck up packages to go faster. My boy worked in one. You have to work in the warehouse to make it to driver unless you know somebody.
USPS, on the other hand, is totally fantastic. That’s why it’s constantly under attack from conservatives who think a government service needs to turn a profit.
Guess that’s the difference between union and non-union employees.
It is absolutely not, but yeah being in a union could entice you to do better work. I wish I was.
I’m fairly sure that at least FedEx ground is all contracted drivers. They’re kinda like a franchise that owns a particular route.
I’ve had packages delivered to my bin before now. Without telling me.
I find it absolutely adorable when people who have never experienced Purolator - they claim to be a package company - complain about any package shipping issue.
- You want invisible buildings? Purolator can’t see 35-storey buildings rising high above a sea of bungalows next to a massive landmark.
- You want customized delivery? If your building has a blue box system FUCK YOU they’re gonna need a signature today and you’re gonna have to beat them to the truck to give it.
- you want careful handling? I think they use packages as ramps to get out of the snow or over speed bumps
- you want friendly service? They’re just pissed you burst out of the bushes to beat them back to the truck
- safe pick-up of the package they can’t seem to deliver? Get out near the airport where it’ll probably be out in the ditch, but be there during the convenient hours of 2 and 4, week-days, and you can fight the thieves for your stuff.
i just don’t know what keeps these guys in business.
I seriously did not realize Purolator was still around. My dad worked for them 40 odd years ago, and quit on the spot, with kids and a wife at home, because of how awful they were (called and checked with my mom first, who was supportive).
They still operate in Canada.
Just today, FedEx said they delivered my two packages from eBay. I looked at the confirmation picture and it’s not even my house! Turns out, they delivered it two doors down to the wrong house. Fortunately, I have an honest neighbor and she brought them to me.
This isn’t the first time this has happened.
I had a tablet that stopped working under warranty. Printed the return label and dropped it into a Purolator box. Later realized I had printed the wrong label. Called them with the exact box location and time that I dropped it off. They couldn’t find it anywhere, so essentially the driver stole it. THEY are the thieves after your package!
I’ve given up on Purolator.
I just contact customer support/the seller and tell them all the steps I took (filling out my complete address, and on the day of, contacting them with my buzzer number), and tell them that I didn’t receive my package despite being home all day. I also didn’t receive their “sorry we missed you” sticky note anywhere. And no missed calls for the buzzer.
They often try to tell me the package is at a pickup point…I tell them that that’s not the address I entered into their system, it’s not the one that you put on the package, and you need to tell Purolator to send it to my address, or they’re going to return it to you/the sender.
This worked for my $1,000 package, thankfully. It didn’t work for my ~$50 packages. So that got sent back to the sender and I got a full refund. And I won’t be buying from them again unless they stop using Purolator.
Meanwhile, Amazon will drop off $200 packages at my doorstep without a signature – the way I want it! Lol
Purolator said they needex me to print out a form saying I authorize a drop off without a signature. I told them the driver is never going to see it because they don’t enter my building’s lobby let alone come up to my apartment. They said to do it anyway and it’d be fine. When I told them it said missed delivery again despite me following their instructions, they stopped replying to my support ticket…lol
I think these guys operate in Australia as fastway
I’ve only heard of Purolator as an automotive filter brand, of which is about the same basic and minimally-achieved OEM specs as FRAM. I guess I should just avoid anything with that name altogether.
Purolator is a bastard company I always freak out when I realize my online order defaulted to Purolator from the shipper’s end. I’d literally send more money so it can be anything else.
Not shilling for FedEx but FedEx has come to my house rang my doorbell and stood there for 1 min and I’ve never seen any other company do this.
USPS will do their damnedest to get you your package, and they’re the cheapest option. US only of course.
Sounds worse than UPS. I know that if I’m supposed to get something from on a Saturday, that it won’t be coming until Monday. Every fucking time “business closed”. I dont live in a fucking business.
Not yet you don’t.
Fedex sucks in general. This box contains 7000 bucks worth of laser cutter/ Box has been handled so harshly that its starting to come open. Not to mention they ignored the this side up part.
Shouldn’t it have been shipped in a crate with tilt indicators if it is truly fragile? You should blame your supplier.
Used to deliver for Amazon. Fragile, handle with care, this side up, lay flat, team lift, don’t stack, all those mean nothing to the warehouse workers or most of the drivers. It’s so chaotic in there and nobody has time to treat packages carefully.
This has been the case for decades, everywhere.
People, package your shit properly or pay the extra amount to ship it specially.
Yepp. I work in shipping, and if you’re not comfortable throwing the box as hard as you can at a wall, you shouldn’t be comfortable shipping it.
So anything more valuable or less impact resistant than a rubber duck should not be shipped? No computer parts, no art, no glassware or porcelain, no tools more complicated than a hammer, and even then the goons might break the handle?
What is the point of your profession? A pittance in, emissions and waste out?
Pretty sure they meant the package, proper bubble wrapping would handle the abuse. That’s on the person boxing it all up.
What do you do for a living?
Generally trying to stay alive, pay rent, afford healthcare, maybe care for their family, for the employees. Blame the massive corporations trying to keep costs as low as possible but trying to have the least amount of drivers delivering the most amount of packages at the lowest pay possible.
I’ve wrapped plenty of sensitive electronics that I’d be comfortable throwing at a wall. Get a larger box than you think you need, some foam wrapping/bubble wrap from another package and use that to form a protective core. Fill the rest of the box with lightly crumpled scrap paper, or packing peanuts if you have them. It ain’t rocket science.
You just have to assume in the first truck the package will sit underneath seven other heavy packages, while the second truck will be completely empty as your package rattles around and bangs against the walls. Anything else is foolishness, you know damn well those trucks aren’t individually fastening every box for a couple euros of gross revenue per delivery.
Just wrap it in bubble wrap.
In part because a large fraction are bullshit.
I have seen boxes with ‘Open carefully, do not use a knife’ on the outer box when there was another set of cardboard boxes inside protecting the product. Oh yeah, real glad I didn’t cut the tape with my blade that’s not long enough to fully cut even one layer of cardboard.
I have also seen a label “delicate product, fold carefully” on fucking denim jackets.
When everything is ‘fragile’ nothing is. If you won’t pay for a packaging engineer then pay for actual special handling.
Just want to shift the blame here: that culture is set by management. The likelihood of damaging any given item to the extent that a claim is made is low enough that throughput is prioritized for profit. It’s a shitty statistics game and your “fragile this side up” means nothing.
I threw boxes for FedEx for a while at an airport. And yeah, “nonconveyable” freight (oversize/oddly shaped/overweight/hazmat) gets handled differently and holy shit is it a nightmare simply because its isn’t easily stackable. Overweight? Yeah, we just tipped that out of the can and let it fall so we could roll it onto the low belt and into the next can. Over/oddly sized? If you’re lucky it got set aside and shoved on top. If not, it got crushed by whatever got thrown on top.
And sidenote: that box looks great, especially if it went through more than one ramp sort.
What did you do with stuff labeled hazmat?
That all got shifted with the non-conveyables (noncons). You’d have to be “certified” to put it in a can.
We tried not to spill the vats of bull semen and human tissue, but both happened at least once.
Think how much it sucks for the guy who planned his whole weekend around that package of bull semen that never arrived.
“Should’ve known it was too good to be true…”
That’s what happens when people don’t want to pay for deliveries.
Do you mean free shipping a la Amazon? Because I’ll be honest: I work shipping and Amazon delivery is probably one of the best delivery services available right now, as fucked as it is.
UPS is great
DHL is great
FedEx is the fucking handy man of Satan. Fuck them, everything they represent, and fuck their mothers. And their mother’s mother. Piece of shit useless ass scum bag company.
FedEx forged my signature. Very lucky that I got my shit, but the company paid extra for me to sign, FedEx called and verified I’d have to be home, they didn’t show up the right day, and the next day randomly showed up and left the item after “I” signed. It wasn’t even someone else in the house that signed. Just a blatantly forged sig by the delivery man.
Nah, Amazon delivers to the wrong address like 30% of the time. Very far from what I consider acceptable. No amount of reporting and “placing a pin on a map” fix the issue. Good thing my neighborhood isn’t full of thiefs (that I’m aware of).
I don’t use UPS or Fedex as much as Amazon, but for the times my packages did went through them, they never delivered to the wrong address.
i was reading about shipping fragile things by USPS…
every forum i found, of people that ship antiques and such, is that marking it “fragile” guarantees that it will get destroyed in transit.
i’ve only tried it once… we packed the thing super nice, and it was completely destroyed…. in was impossible to do on accident… even if they had treated it like a regular package, it would’ve been destroyed.
but, treat employees like shit, pay them shit, and they’re going to be malicious….All I see is a packaged
yousomeone failed to pack and ship properly. If you want white glove service, then you have to pay for white glove service.
Obviously screw FedEx, but why the hell is the # symbol part of the door code? It’s just asking for this to happen.
You press the # to start writing the code on Yale doorman, or to lock the door
Ohh, I see. That makes it more clear than saying it’s part of the code
I guess its like one of those digilocks
where people always wrote the codes as “C1234” even though C is just a reset button that puts all the pins back into place so a code can be entered. It’s easier to tell people its C1234 than saying it’s 1234, but press C first.
Or better yet:
“It’s 1234. If that doesn’t work, press C then 1234.”
Is that better? I’ve had email replies fail to pick up the latter half of sentences. I wouldn’t trust it in physical instructions!
Yeah, usually it’s described like “press pound, then…” to avoid confusion.
Yeah but anyone under 30 doesn’t know # as pound, it’s hashtag.
