It has been the last few years. If you’re paying for cheap shipping they either just sit on it for days then ship it with the same shipping they would have if you’d paid more for shipping, or else they just send it off on an incredible journey, often taking it well out of its way.
I once bought something from Canada, it crossed the border in Windsor/Detroit, which is south of me. instead of leaving their Detroit facility and heading north to me, it headed on down to Ohio, then turned around and back through Detroit before it heading to me, adding another day or two of travel. Still made it by the date I was supposed to receive it, but it could have been much earlier if not for their bullshit shenanigans.
They’re clearly just using whatever they can to “punish” you for picking cheap shipping.
Actually, it’s “we might get a reputation and then shippers won’t use our more expensive services”. Normally this means they just use the standard transportation for that method (like trucks for Ground service) instead of moving the package via a faster transportation method if there is space available (which is what they used to do).
They normally don’t hold stuff at a location if it gets there early, but there are some exceptions. For example, I have a UPS package that got to my local station yesterday (the 6th) but it isn’t scheduled for delivery until 2 days from now (the 9th).
And they definitely don’t intentionally route packages via less-than-ideal paths. Not that their idea of the optimal path matches yours - without “inside info” on schedules, you probably won’t be able to figure out the way a package will be routed. However, once in a while a package develops “wandering gnome syndrome” where it visits random locations. Here is a FedEx example. Instead of being routed to NYC, it got as close as Keasbey, NJ (a big FedEx Ground terminal) and then visited 2 facilities in Pennsylvania, one in South Carolina (which it was never logged as leaving), then 2 in Florida. And the second location in Florida shipped it to itself after a time warp where it was in the local delivery area in the facility 5 hours before it arrived at that facility.
So far, this holiday season, I’ve had Amazon packages delivered by UPS, USPS, FedEx, and random dudes in unmarked vehicles.
The fun we have at our house is to find where the packages have been placed. We have a lovely protected breezeway, which would be the most logical place to put packages. Again, this holiday season, we’ve had packages at the front door, in the breezeway, tucked alongside the breezeway stairs, in front of the garage door, and one tucked under a shrub by the front door. It’s like hunting for Easter eggs.
That’s exactly what it is though; in theory, UPS/FedEx use their efficient macro-level shipping to get the package close, and then hand it over to the USPS for local delivery.
Problem is that apparently UPS/FedEx deprioritize the packages internally so that the packages meander toward their destinations because they get thrown on whatever truck has room going in that general direction, and then eventually hand the package over to the USPS in some (to me) strange locations, where it then has several USPS hops to get to you.
I’ve had good luck with Surepost. Perhaps because the UPS center is close to the PO. It does give consistent delivery times. The only thing I don’t like is tracking gets a little uncertain. I have not noticed any reduced prioritization, but then again it could jsut because of the local setup of these 2 places.
We are having horrible problems with Amazon packages. Specifically when delivery goes from UPS to USPS for final delivery to our home. We’ll get updates that the package is now marked “delivered” but it won’t show up at our door for two more days. We’ll get updates the package is “delivered” but it never shows up at all. For us the problem is USPS service and as near we can tell Amazon and UPS are doing their part. Things fall down with the local USPS offices and delivery. We are not the only ones in our city by the way, many friends of ours from different parts of the city are all reporting the same problems. We’ve filed complaints, mail fraud claims, etc. to no avail. My wife has now started bombing Amazon via social media calling attention to the fact that their partnership with USPS to handle the last leg of delivery is failing badly in our city. I am not optimistic it’ll do any good.
From what I understand from googling “smartpost problems” and “surepost problems”, the only good thing about the UPS/FedEx - USPS partnerships is the price;
The rest of it is a clusterf**k of the worst sort, with neither side going out of their way in the least bit to make the other side’s life easier. As a result, packages shambolically meander around until they arrive at some indeterminate point, status updates are misleading or entirely missing, and things are lost, delayed or otherwise not where they’re supposed to be a lot of the time.
