UPS - How do they stay in business? (Long, I'm afraid.)

Most certainly not. UPS drivers in America make between $50,000 and $60,000 a year with overtime. They are highly paid for what they do. OTOH, they have to deal with supervisors constantly pissing and moaning at them to work faster and more efficiently.

Bad customer service can happen at any company. All it takes is one bad delivery person or phone rep. I am sure that some people have had a problem with any of the major shipping companies.

UPS, however, has an entire system that is designed to fail. Thier deliveries aresimply not done with the individual consumer in mind.

UPS sucks.

What can brown do for me? Brown can stay out of my underpants. That’s what brown can do for me.

I think UPS is reading this thread. I got a delivery today and the driver actually left it outside my gate in my packages box, and didn’t try to come in. I saw him.

And the box only had one dented corner, oh joy!

Well, hallelujah and jubilee. It finally arrived.

A note to anyone who wants to send me something: Don’t send it by UPS!!!

Well, it just so happens that I used to work for UPS. The reason why your packages are often crushed+mangled is because of the way the people in the trucks load them. Imagine standing for hours at a time in an incredibly hot (100 degrees+) semi-trailer while lifting packages off a belt and finding a place to load them tightly as to avoid having a wall of packages falling on you. No fun, trust me. You have to work hard as hell (I was COVERED in sweat after my shift). Plus, because the loaders dont have any libility on your packages, we often would throw/kick/stomp them into place. Good times, huh?

I also have UPS horror stories, mostly in dealings with Amazon. It’s to the point that I told both business I will no longer do business with them. Further, I won’t do business with any one that only offers only UPS shipping.

I found their “Brown” adverstising campaign strangely satisfying, in a “We’re openly telling the whole world we’re shit” kind of way. Maybe it’s guilt, or maybe just karma. Either way, I’m pleased.

I’ve never made a secret of the fact that my husband works for the US Postal Service, and he’ll be the first to admit that they have their share of lazy/incompetent people working there.

However, I have had my share of UPS troubles too. Just yesterday, in fact, my husband was expecting a delivery from Dell that required a signature. His sister lives in the upstairs apartment, and was home during the delivery time. The guy just left a note, ignoring the “ring both doorbells for deliveries” note that was up on the door, and left.

Another time, my husband was home waiting on a UPS delivery and checked the door at 3:15. There was an “attempted but no one home” note there, and the time of the attempt was noted to be 3:30. He drove right over to the UPS delivery center (at the time, we lived about a half mile from the one that served our area), and showed a clerk there the note, asking her to check the time written on it.

Plus there have been several instances where the only way I learned an attempt to deliver had been made was by checking tracking info, as apparently the delivery person didn’t bother to leave a note at all.

My last workplace had trouble with UPS too. There were weird package pickup rules, like packages shipped by Ground could not be left for the daily pickup in the usual area in our building - it had to be some form of express shipping (2nd day, overnight). We had a UPS pickup box outside where we could put them in, but the slot was only large enough to handle small packages. Anything larger than maybe 6" tall (I can’t remember exactly) couldn’t fit. We were encouraged to not ship via any express method unnecessarily due to budget concerns, but this really put you in a bind if you had a decent-sized package that had to go out, as there weren’t any conveniently-located sites nearby that we could drop the packages off at. If you took public transportation, like many of us did, that really made it tough to figure out what to do with the package.

I had Amazon troubles via the USPS, though, this summer. I had two book shipments sent, and both got hung up for a week at a particular USPS distribution center in the Chicago area - the wrong one to be delivering to my area, too. Both times when I called the 1-800 customer service number for the USPS, I explained that my husband is my letter carrier (we live on his route), where the shipment was delayed, and so on. One time, the person on the line then asked if I’d spoken to my letter carrier… :smack: Er, yes, every day, but that’s not going to help me! I was trying to figure out why the packages had not left the distribution center for my local post office, but somehow I guess even using USPS terminology didn’t help them understand. They ended up giving me the phone number for my local post office, sigh. (By the way, most of the time, this is what you want to get as the local post office will probably be able to answer your questions, but in my case I knew the package was not at that office yet.)

I am comforted to see that I am not the only one. I have been extremely frustrated by UPS’s failures to get my packages to me. I would now much rather have something come through the post office.

When I complained to the supervisor at the pick-up location that the driver would not leave packages at my door, I was told that if the package got stolen, the driver would be financially responsible. So they have a dumb and cruel policy, but expect me to agree to it to spare the poor driver. The supervisor also said that they would send someone to my house to determine if there was somewhere secure to leave packages, but she repeatedly failed to call me back until I gave up.

I just want Dale to race the truck.

Get out of my head!!!

It made me sad when I realized I could no longer buy from Amazon, because I cannot tell them “DO NOT SHIP BY UPS.”

UPS bad.

UPS is the antichrist. They won’t leave packages for me without signatures which would be fine, IF THEY KNOCKED ON MY DOOR! At one point, I was so frustrated with recieving “no one available” notes on my door while I sat 5 feet from it (obviously they didn’t knock) that I stood in my hallway when I saw the truck pull up, RIGHT BY MY DOOR. I hear someone walk onto my porch, I hear a little scratch and then FOOTSTEPS WALKING AWAY! I flung open the door to find the UPS guy had put yet another “not available” note on my door and was walking away! I yelled at him to come back and asked him why he didn’t knock. He said he did to which I replied “maybe you should try a little harder next time, considering I was right next to the door.” To that, he sheepishly gave me the thing to sign and I FINALLY got my package. The devil’s I tell you…

Then there was the FedEx guy that woke me up by BANGING on my door repeatedly for about 10 minutes. At 8:00 a.m. On my day off. I yanked open the door wearing my robe and oh-so-attractive bed head, he looked pretty embarrased. He’s lucky I didn’t have a bat in my hand as well. A morning person I am not. Tenacious little bastards they are…

The main thing that pisses me off about UPS is their policy against same-day pickup. FedEx, Airborne, and USPS all allow me to pick up a package the same day a delivery attempt occured. When I bought my computer, they told me I couldn’t do a same day pickup, even though the damn boxes were sitting in the warehouse. Then, when I used the online system to tell them to hold the boxes at the warehouse, only one box stays there. (It was a two box shipment, one with the computer and one with the monitor.) Plus, when I picked up the other box, did someone offer to help me to the car? No. The clerk tersely told me where I could find a hand cart. The box was 4’ x 1’, and 40 lbs. A bit unwieldly for one person to carry through the door. The boxes were dented too. I think the only reason the contents survived the trip in good condition was the custom molded packing material.

Personally, I LOVE UPS!

Even nicely-worded bitch sessions belong in the BBQ Pit.
Be seeing you.

The main thing that keeps UPS in biz is that USPS typically doesn’t make package pickups.

For companies like Amazon and Dell, and places I have to deal with like Mouser, Digi-Key, Clippard, Traver’s and McMaster-Carr, they have to rely on the carrier coming to the warehouse to pick up big quantities of packages.

Basically, with a few exceptions, UPS’ll come get 'em, USPS won’t.

Amazon simply can’t have some clerk zip down and wait in line with 25,000 packaged DVDs at the Post Office every day. With UPS, the company can print their own package tags and address labels, stick 'em on, and when they’re picked up, the driver just has to scan 'em one by one and stick 'em in the truck.

UPS is big-business friendly, and much less customer-friendly. USPS is the other way.

Personally, for my stuff, the Post Office is faster, easier, and roughly 40% cheaper for equivalent packages. My customers get stuff right away, there’s few delivery hassles, and I have no problems with CODs, cash vs. money orders or tracking numbers.

On the other hand, I too have suffered the “harried driver” syndrome: My shop is three car lengths from my house, the driveway passes directly between them in a horseshoe- the driver can simply pass through without having to back up. No dogs. Rural neighborhood- nearest other house is 150 yards through the dense woods. Summertime, shop door and garage door wide open, music blaring. Note on door saying something like “We’re in the shop, follow the noise”.

Poke my head out and look, nothing.

Poke my head out and look ten minutes later, there’s a yellow slip on the house door directly below my note.

And, most customer-friendly of all, their warehouse has walk in hours of 8:30 am to 10:00 am, Monday through Friday.

It seems pretty obvious from some of these stories that the drivers often don’t knock on the door at all. I’ll offer a rationalization of this (not an excuse) If they were to knock on the door of every person who wasn’t home and stand there waiting for them to not answer, they would spend a whole lotta time standing around. If they actually did spend that time standing around, efficiency would drop, they would need more drivers, and costs/prices would go up.

My UPS guy doesn’t knock on my door either, he just leaves the package and goes away. I never get to provide a signature. If he did ring and get my sig, he would easily spend an extra minute at my door, even if I get there right away. Multiply that by a few dozen deliveries, and you get some serious extra time to finish his job.

When I built my computer, I bought all the parts separately on Pricewatch and had them shipped to my house. Some came by USPS, some by FedEx, and some by UPS.

The last part was due to arrive one day by UPS. I looked up the tracking number on ups.com at 10 AM, and it said the package was scheduled to arrive at 11:30. I eagerly waited for the UPS truck to show up, but it never came. I checked the web site again in a couple hours, and it said the package had been delivered at 11:30!

I looked outside again, thinking maybe UPS had delivered it with an invisible James Bond truck… still no package. I called UPS and they were no more helpful than their web site. Finally I walked down the road looking at the other houses. I found my package inside a screen door a couple houses down.

This house had a number painted on the garage, which was clearly not the number of my house–yet the driver had left my valuable package with these strangers, and told his bosses he left it at my house instead!

What do you know-- I had dinner last night and sat next to a UPS driver. He seemed very nice and I didn’t notice any horns growing out of his head…

I’ve personally never had a problem with UPS. As others have said, they just leave it on my front doorstep. If it’s something that requires a signature, they leave me a little yellow sticky and I have to drive a few miles to their distribution hq.

I think it’s a bit unreasonable for people who want UPS, et al to deliver when they are home. Remember that businesses are what keep these companies profitable and therefore they have to cater to businesses. And most businesses are open 9 to 5. Besides, can you imagine finding people’s houses in the dark?

BTW, the friendly UPS driver next to me said that today he had 204 stops. That doesn’t include pick-ups. Next week he’ll have more than that. So be friendly to your neighborhood UPS driver. I’d hate to imagine what would happen if someone “went UPS.”

Pizza Delivery guys have been doing it for years. I don’t see what darkness has to do with it.