How are package delivery services where you live?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Between holiday shopping and all the stuff we’ve needed for our boat project, we’ve gotten a LOT of items delivered in recent months. In fact, for several years now, we’ve done a great deal of ordering on line. Most drivers are great, and one company is particularly awful.

We have a fairly big mailbox, so most things coming via USPS fit there, but on the rare occasions when the package is too large, it will be left on our covered porch - sometimes next to the door, sometimes at the end nearest the driveway (which is best for us, since we come in thru the garage, not the front door.) The point is, deliveries are left out of the weather.

UPS and Amazon are similarly consistent about our packages, with virtually all of them being left right by the front door.No one rings the doorbell any more, but since I get a text as soon as something is delivered, it’s almost as instant.

Then there’s FedEx. Not only is their “tracking” pretty much worthless, the vast majority of times, it’s as if they open the truck door and kick our items into the driveway before taking off. I’ve lost track of how many times boxes are left where, if we didn’t check, we’d back right over them as we leave the garage. And it’s not as if it’s a long trek from the driveway to the porch - maybe all of 15’ to set a box on the end out of the weather.

I’ve responded to their “How was your delivery?” link pointing out the awful delivery practices we’ve experienced. One time, the box was left on the porch. Then it was back to the driveway. Tonight we got a small delivery in a bubble envelope, and I swear, the driver must have just frisbee’d it on to the porch, halfway between the drive and the door.

I can’t help but wonder if this is FedEx in general or just the drivers coming out of Upper Marlboro, MD. I’m curious if other folks have problems with packages coming from a particular hub or company. I can’t imagine FedEx staying in business if they’re this awful everywhere. And I’m just a little miffed that a delivery they promised today hasn’t materialized (tho I truly didn’t expect it would.)

2

I haven’t had anything delivered by FedEx recently but I have had some issues with USPS. I had a package from Macy’s go walkabout recently. I ordered it on Cyber Monday and it finally showed up yesterday. It took so long to deliver that I reached out to Macy’s and they offered to send a replacement. They sent it Tuesday via UPS and I got it Friday morning. Now I have two packages but Macy’s said not to worry about sending the original back. Just some PJs and my nieces can use the duplicates.

3

Fedex has been consistently horrible for us in 3 places we have had. Tracking seems like a suggestion and delivery date a guess. Packages are at least usually placed OK though.

UPS is pretty solid all around

USPS also basically OK, though some tracking anomalies like saying delivered sometimes means the next day.

DHL, well they said last Friday, then next Friday, then yesterday. Package seems to be in their facility just sitting, perhaps hoping I will come and pick it up if they just delay long enough.

Amazon, weird times of day (night), but usually great, however I have had them just leave it at the curb in the past. That nonsense has thankfully gone away.

4

I buy a lot online.

For me here, Amazon and USPS are simply fantastic. Stuff doesn’t get lost or mishandled, tracking is reliable, etc. UPS, FedEx, and DHL are by comparison a distinct second tier. Stuff sometimes goes into a holding pattern or a crazy routing for no apparent reason. But those three are equally good.

Part of my distinction between those two tiers is that I live in a large building with 450 apartments. Amazon delivers to my personal apartment door. USPS delivers to my personal mailbox. All the others just deliver their truckload to the building’s front desk. Which interposes another bureaucracy that can mishandle my packages. They’re really good, but nobody is perfect.

It’s the oddball carriers I truly despise:
Lasership, Uni-Uni, SpeedX, GoFo, and two or three others.

Those packages frequently end up lost completely, with delivery photos that aren’t my building at all. And of course their only “customer service” is an AI bot that will respond with “It was delivered on [date] at [time]. Here’s a pic of your delivery. Go away.” And of course the seller and the carrier just refer you to the other one for satisfaction.

5

FedX is the bane of my life.

UPS and USPS are pretty good. Our main problem is our long gated driveway. They will not ring the gate bell. So they leave in on the front of the gate, tossed over, once a clever balancing act on a post.

FedX has never successfully found me. So I get messages. I can tell them I’ll pick up.

I’m not sure how much was listed undeliverable.

I have a big box at the post office(not near) so anything coming thru them lands there.

6

And the package FedEx said I’d get today arrived in Memphis this evening… from New Hampshire, coming to Maryland. Good job, FedEx. Looks like my grands will be getting their t-shirts late. So, next stop maybe Seattle? Or Salt Lake city?

OK, I can’t blame them entirely. The shipper told me several times on several dates that my order was on the way. Liars…

7

Here is suburban Silicon Valley it is pretty good. Stuff comes when promised, or a tiny bit later. They put things by the door where it is a bit hidden from the street, but since I live across from a school I am not in prime porch theft territory. Amazon drivers ring the bell. Got two things tonight already.

8

Memphis is the location of FedEx’s main air hub; they have a massive sorting facility there. Most of FedEx’s air packages go through Memphis, get sorted there, and placed on another plane going back out to their nearest airport facility to you later that same evening.

The fact that they originally estimated today, and it only made it to Memphis tonight, says to me that it’s a day late. Fingers crossed for you that it does get to you tomorrow (well, later today, as I write this).

9

For us, in suburban Chicago:

  • USPS is generally excellent. The local post office has a good staff, and trackable packages through them always arrive promptly, once they make it to the local office. Things do sometimes get delayed in transit, but that’s a general USPS thing.
  • UPS is also usually pretty good. I’ve not had any issues with a UPS delivery in a long time.
  • Our primary experience with FedEx is delivery of cat food, from two different companies (Chewy and Smalls). They’re usually pretty reliable, though they will project a rough delivery time during the day, and only hit that about half the time. They’re very good about putting the packages right on the porch.
  • Amazon is a mixed bag. In the last few years, it’s become common for shipments to get randomly delayed in transit, usually with no projected delivery date (and Amazon makes it really difficult to try to cancel and get a refund). When we get a “your shipment is delayed” message from them, everything is up for grabs: it might actually show up on time, it might be a day late, it might fall off the face of the earth. Also, it’s common these days for the packaging to get beat up in transit (torn, dented, etc.), and now that they ship a lot of stuff in kraft-paper envelopes, that often leads to the contents getting damaged. They are usually good about putting packages on the front porch, but our porch is at the top of six stairs, and it’s not uncommon for packages to only make it halfway up those stairs.
  • We virtually never get a package from DHL, so no comments to be made about them.
10

Here in Australia it is a breeze,
You register with Australia Post for a free parcel locker.
This gives you a unique permanent ID that you can use at any parcel locker location in Australia.
I mostly use either the one at the shops 10 minutes from home or the one at the train station 2 minutes from my office. I have had stuff delivered to lockers interstate if they were going to arrive while I was on holiday.
They are free to use and 100% secure.
My friends and workmates will sometimes pick up parcels for one another when convenient. You just send someone your code and they go grab it.

11

Fedex is not a major player in my country (thankfully). We have a wide variety of delivery companies: besides DHL, there’s GLS, Landmark, and others, including of course our state service. Most of them have some sort of interactive alert, where they contact you ahead of the delivery (usually via email) to give you a heads-up on the time, and ask if you have special instructions. We keep a waterproof parcel box next to the front door, and we reply to tell the driver to drop the package in the box. It always works well. We’ve never had anything damaged in transit and nothing ever disappears from our front door. Turns out healthy regulation and competition are motivators for quality.

12

Package delivery services are all pretty good where I live (rural Pennsylvania).

Most of our packages come either via UPS or USPS. Deliveries from FedEx are much less common but we have never had a problem with them.

The only complaint I have is that because we are rural, packages take longer to get to us. Amazon packages often take a day longer than their original estimate, and, being rural, we are apparently near the end of their delivery runs since the packages are usually marked as “out for delivery” around 7 am, but we always get our packages late in the day (typically around 5 or 6 pm or so). Once the package actually ships, the updated estimate is usually accurate.

13

In the UK the answer is: mixed.

Royal Mail is fine - they ring the bell if anything doesn’t fit in the slot and if you’re not home will take it to the local collection office for you (in our case this is about a 15 minute walk away, so no biggie).

Amazon - put the package by the door, ring the bell, and vanish into thin air before the door opens. Ninjas!

EVRI (formerly Hermes) - notoriously bad, with packages getting opened, getting trashed or just going missing. I do not like them, Sam I Am.

DPD - varies by delivery person. Had one yesterday who just literally threw the boxes down on the doorstep and left without knocking or ringing. Fortunately the contents were not fragile. But sometimes they do the job properly, ringing, waiting for you to answer and then taking a photo.

Yodel - again, varies by delivery person. We have a semi-regular woman who delivers things properly (always followed by one of us making the same joke: “Who was at the door?” “It was the Yodel Lady.” “The Yodel Lady who?” Oh how we laugh). But the others who come are less diligent.

UPS and FedEx deliveries are quite rare but we get the odd one. They’ve been okay.

14

That’s a huge problem.

Once your order is taken, the fulfiller can create a shipping label and get a tracking number with their chosen courier. At which point the fullfiller’s computer often updates the status shown to the public as “shipped.” That’s a flat-out lie that ought to be illegal. They’ve expressed an intent to ship; they have not shipped.

If you take that tracking number and go to the courier’s website you’ll find they report some variation of “Tracking number assigned but we don’t have your package yet.”

When the shipping label is created just as the picking order hits the warehouse and your goods are in the sealed labeled box an hour later and the courier truck comes by later that day everything works smoothly and accurately.

When your goods are out of stock and it’ll be a week or three before they show up at the warehouse to be first unpacked & stacked and then picked for you and all the other accumulated pending orders, and meanwhile your seller’s package status says “shipped”, you’re just experiencing enshittification. With no recourse.

15

How can you put the package on the ground, right below the doorbell & not ring it. Your arm is practically touching it anyway & it would take a fraction of a second to push it. If you have 300 packages & do that at all of 'em, it would add up to maybe two extra minutes. When you discount the fences they don’t walk thru, the packages they frisbee onto the porch, etc. it won’t even take that long.

Some places the drivers have routes. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s really one driver serving your neighborhood.

My bane is the a-hole Amazon part-timers, you know, the ones who use their own car, & park in the middle of the street. Just last night on a three-car width street with legal parking on both sides (so only one drivable lane); not one but two parallel parking spaces in a row. Does he pull in there? Noooo, he is one car in front of them because he’s a lazy, sociopathic PoS! Yes, bub, this whole line of cars wants to wait while you make multiple deliveries on the block, pulling up a bit each time. :thinking:

16

Because many people don’t want to be disturbed by the doorbell that can wake you or a baby up from a nap or rile up the dogs. The default is not to disturb people became more of a standard practice during Covid. They aren’t being lazy. You can specify that you want to be notified by a doorbell with the carriers.

Anyway, I’m clearly fortunate that USPS, UPS, FedEx, Amazon and very occasionally DHL all work well for me and I get a fair amount of deliveries.

17

UPS and USPS are great.

FedEx is mixed (delivery tracking is almost always off by a day for some reason).

I have a normal mailbox at the street, so most packages won’t fit for USPS. All three delivery services just leave things at my door. We don’t have a problem with porch pirates here.

18

My experience has not been so good with Amazon. Mostly it is - I have explicit instructions to deliver to my front door and mostly they do. I’d say ~90%. However the layout of my place is such (it’s on a hill and requires either two separate elevator rides or elevator + stairs to get to my front door) that overloaded delivery drivers in a rush are going to be very tempted to dump packages in the lobby by the mailboxes, despite a sign explicitly telling them not to do that. There is no front desk. Around the holidays like now it can get bad, with several boxes a day dumped, particularly when some residents haven’t added explicit instructions on Amazon to drop at their front doors. I’ve also had a few packages delivered to the closely neighboring wrong building that differs by one number ( as an example building 100-unit #1 instead of building 101-unit #1).

USPS by contrast is perfect because it is part of a route, so the same person working it everyday generally guarantees delivery to the right spot. I get little from FedEx or other outfits, but I’ve had to date perfect service from them as well.

So Amazon, so good most places (and at my old house they themselves were perfect, porch thieves were a minor issue) are the slightly unreliable ones here.

19

All of my package deliveries, whether from Amazon, UPS, FedEx, or CVS are placed on my porch, and even clear of my front door so I can open it to get the package.

I suppose I should be making offerings to the delivery gods.

20

I’ve had good luck with all of them, but this happened a few weeks ago.

I was working in the garage with the big door open because it was nice out. Stepped into the house for a couple minutes. While I was in, a package was delivered. I finished in the garage and closed the door as I entered the house.

Later I noticed the garage door hadn’t shut all the way; there was a gap at one end because the deliverer had placed the small box right under the open door, ensuring that the door would partially crush the box. No damage to the comments.