I’m currently about 90 miles from home with an important package scheduled for delivery to my home tomorrow. No one will be there to sign for it, or to pick it up, so I called the delivery company (FedEx, but UPS does it too) and asked whether they could hold it at the local FedEx office so I could pick it up – I don’t mind a 3-hour roundtrip for this. However, the CS rep told me that they have to attempt delivery and fail before they can have it held for me.
My question is this: Why, when I know in advance that I’m not going to be there, can I not have the package held unless they attempt and fail to deliver the package? I have asked the CS rep this question every time, both with FedEx and UPS, but all I ever get is an explanation that it’s their policy. Surely someone here must know.
One reason the policy might exist (if indeed it does and you didn’t just talk to someone who couldn’t be bothered to help) could be:
If they attempt to deliver and drop a card through your door, you take the card to the depot and your possession of the card constitites evidence you are the intended recipient of the package. Otherwise, perhaps it would be possible for the package to be intercepted by someone other than the intended recipient by requesting a hold, then collecting it from the depot before the recipient realises it has gone astray.
Of course that would require that the person intercepting know that the package was en route, which seems fairly unlikely under normal circumstances. I dunno - it might still be something like this, but just to cover their asses against false claims that someone other than the recipient intercepted it.
My company has service guys who receive spare parts overnight to repair equipment with.
Many of them have our shipping guys simply mail the item directly to the FedEx depot in their town, care of “Bob Serviceguy”.
The only drawback is you’d have to convince your vendor that he should ship to a site besides your credit card’s billing address. It isn’t REALLY a fraud risk, as the FedEx guys will card you every single time, but someone who has just had a few chargebacks might not be convinced to do it.
It’s been my experience as well that if pressed, they will offer this option. You must press hard and it may take more than one rep, as mentioned above.
I’ve said it before, if you tell them it’s urgently needed medication they are more likely to cooperate with your request.
Both times I’ve called and had a package held for me (once UPS, once FedEx), and then picked it up at their office, they required that I show identification, and that the ID show the same address as on the package.
So you’d have to also have a fake ID to scam something this way.
The problem is that shipper (not you) has designated this a deliver to home shipment and once a package is in transit, they can’t change the delivery method. If the shipper had set this up as a hold at office for pickup shipment from the beginning, there wouldn’t be a problem.
Another aspect of the problem is that you are just a voice on the phone and they have no easy way to verify that you are the receiver. You should actually be glad of this as you wouldn’t want me (for example) to be able to reroute a shipment of yours with a simple phone call. It’s their policy to not reroute packages in transit because it causes fewer problems in the long run.