We got a notice from UPS a couple of weeks ago about a delivery that required customs charges on it. We decided it wasn’t worth being scammed again and didn’t bother. Let UPS and the shipper deal with the return.
Are you sure it was UPS and not a scam?
UPS logo on the slip left on our door; led me to UPS website; chatted with a local UPS outlet who confirmed it was the right website.
I only get this with Amazon packages - I don’t get it for packages delivered by USPS, even if they are from Amazon. I might get it for Amazon packages delivered by UPS ( I haven’t gotten one of those in a while) but I definitely don’t get a photo from non-Amazon UPS deliveries.
Some do … most of the time. It seems to mostly depend on how over-loaded the driver is that day. When they’re late, pictures become optional. Guess what: management’s goal is that they be overloaded and late every day. Anything less is not maximizing profitability.
Next item: What good is a picture in which you cannot identify the package tracking number and the background is an undifferentiated wall or grass or tabletop? In some cases you can readily recognize that whatever package is in the picture wasn’t delivered to you since you don’t have that background at your address. But how do you prove to e.g. UPS or Amazon that the background can’t be yours and they misdirected the package? UNless they want to send a staffer out to look around your property?
e.g. short true story time:
I live in a big highrise apartment building (400+ units) at 123 East Busy Boulevard. There is a similar but unrelated apartment building at 123 West Busy Boulevard 3 blocks away. Each building receives easily 100 packages a day. Most of which are left directly with the building front desk, but some couriers go so far as to bring the packages to the individual units’ front doors.
It’s typical that there are packages left behind for the other building every day. There’s an established run between the two buildings so the two front desk staffs can exchange their daily flux of mis-delivered packages. Which works great for the packages left at the front desk. But …
There is no apartment number corresponding to mine in the other complex’s building. Yet I’ve gotten pix of my package sitting next to the wrong color of door on the wrong pattern of carpet. Yep, it’s three blocks away but adjacent to one of the 400 apartments there. At an apartment number that cannot possibly match the one on my package. Which one is it in front of? No way to know. Maybe that resident will turn it in to their front desk. When they’re next there 3 weeks from now. etc. Maybe they’ll keep it or pitch it or …
Bottom line: Pix are no panacea. The ones we can see on their websites IME also don’t have any attached lat/long. Maybe their systems keep that, but we can’t see it.
Can’t speak to what happens elsewhere, but they don’t do it here. The guy who came to our door to imply we were lying certainly didn’t have a picture to show us.
A major reason I have a very distinctive doormat (that and I like the mat itself), makes it simple to determine if the delivery photo was actually taken at my door or if I need to go play scavenger hunt to find my package.
In my area, UPS is good, USPS and Amazon do decently, Walmart is OK when they get drivers who can bother to read apartment numbers correctly (someone with bad hips does NOT need to be doing unnecessary climbs up stairs to retrieve heavy packages, since I live on the ground floor for good reasons). FedYecchs is abysmal. I have MAYBE a 50/50 shot at a package arriving to my correct address in a reasonably timely manner, and drivers on this route seem to have a penchant for lying about delivery attempts I can positively state did not occur.
Whenever I have seen something similar to the OP, it is that the warehouse has filled in the paperwork and the package is in the system waiting to be scanned in when UPS picks it up.
Our national postal service has a neat thing they offer where you can sign into your household account and specify as a general preference where you want them to leave your parcels. Front door, garden shed, back terrace, hold at the local post office, whatever. And in my experience, it’s been extremely reliable. The drivers consistently respect the choice.
Of course, if it’s UPS or DHL rolling up, you takes your chances. But the Post handles probably three quarters of the normal deliveries, so it’s a pretty good service.
Some years ago, when Amazon switched from using the postal service to their own delivery system, I was unhappy because I thought I’d always have to be available to answer the door, whereas the post office always leaves parcels in the secure parcel bin area of the community mailbox (unless it needs a signature).
I shouldn’t have worried. The Amazon guy never even bothers ringing the doorbell. Still, FWIW, I’ve had no problems with deliveries. I like the gadgetry they have where, when the van is a few blocks from my house, I can track it on a map in real time. I don’t know of any other shipper who has that nifty feature. And they do take a picture of the package at least 90% of the time.
UPS etc isn’t letting them ‘do’ anything other than print out the label. Anything you see stating that the item has been ‘shipped’ is the shipper changing the status on their website. UPS etc saying that a label has been generated but they haven’t received the item is them going out of their way to make sure you understand that, even though you have a tracking number, the item hasn’t shipped yet.
Your anger should be directed at places like ebay or Amazon where the seller can change the status to ‘shipped’ when it’s not.
I haven’t read all the replies but we ship dozens of packages via UPS every day. The status in the OP is what you get after the label is printed but before it is scanned by UPS. There are lots of reasons why the label might not be scanned by the pickup driver or even the terminal before it is sent across the country (especially during high volume during the holidays). It’s not uncommon for that status to still be up when the package is received by your local terminal.
My last gig was Logistics, in charge of the supply chain and the common carrier accounts for ~2M shipments/yr.
I just wanted to call you out for knowing and suggesting this as a possibility. It was the first thing that occurred to me, but it’s anything but common knowledge.
In fact, I had a situation similar to the OP once, related to a shipment I was expecting from Sears. I Googled around enough to find contact info for a Logistics executive and actually got him on the phone.
I asked if they were zone skipping. They were. I told him that my package ‘appeared to be in a lengthy limbo,’ and that they were better off if their database triggered the ‘shipped’ email on the first intake scan from the common carrier, rather than when the tracking number was generated.
A couple weeks later, I received a very nice thank you note and a $100 gift card from the Sears logistics guy. Apparently, they evaluated and were implementing my suggestion.
Which didn’t save the company, but … hey … I tried 
I have bought an embarrassing amount of cheap Chinese crappola from Temu in the last ~8 months.
A LOT of it is sent by China Post from some Chinese city I’ve never heard of to a warehouse in Los Angeles, Anchorage, or Chicago. Where, post-customs, it’s handed off to UPS to go cross-country to my city then handed over to USPS to bring from our local UPS depot to my mailbox.
Zone skipping indeed.
Often the UPS package label originating in Los Angeles is generated before the goods leave the warehouse shelves in China.
It’s now (barely) over two weeks since you were told it shipped. Have you received it? Have you contacted the company to ask them why not?
Okay, more details for anyone who cares.
I sent an email to the company yesterday. I apparently am not the only person who has done so. Because they sent out a mass response today acknowledging problems exist.
Reading between the lines, I think this is a case of a small company that got in over their heads. They seem to have done a good job on designing and manufacturing this game but they’ve dropped the ball on delivering the game to their customers. Most of these deliveries are being carried out by third party distributors the company contracted with but the problems seem to be happening all over the world (with the exception of Japan and South Korea). I can sympathize to some extent but this is a whole series of problems and at some point you’ve got to trace the issue back to the company that made the decisions.
So apparently my package, along with all of the other packages being delivered to customers in North America, is sitting in a warehouse somewhere in California. They expect it will be shipped out within one to two weeks. This is actually better than the schedule they have been giving to customers in Europe and Asia. Some of their packages are still at sea and some haven’t even left the factory yet.
But here’s the irony. As I mentioned above, the package is a board game. The game is titled Cargo Empire. And the theme of the game is about delivering packages around the world with the greatest possible efficiency.
Thanks for the update. And yes, it’s ironic. Perhaps they should have tried playing the game before trying to ship it?
I ordered a car part on Ebay shipping from Lithuania at the end of July. It made it to customs in the US quick enough then sat there for 4 weeks. I contacted the seller and they refunded the purchase per Ebay rules. Guess what showed up 2 days ago.
Forgot to mention that in my city, UPS only has drop-off outlets, if you want to ship something. There are no pick-up outlets.
If you miss delivery, fooey-on-youie - you should be home during 8 to 5 to receive the package, and there is no place to pick it up if you miss delivery (unlike Canada Post, FedEx, Purolator, etc.) Their business model in my city assumes that people do not work 8 to 5.