We’ve always had problems with UPS drivers being impatient. I work at a doctor’s office. You know how most doctor’s offices have a reception counter in the lobby, and then through a door a separate checkout counter? Our offices have glass at the reception counter, so UPS drivers will barge in through the second set of doors and leave their packages in the hallway, then grab a signature at the checkout counter. But sometimes there is a patient at checkout, in which case the driver will walk around the counter which is strictly employees-only.
There are four problems with this behavior.
Rudeness. The receptionists knows UPS drivers are busy af and will put calls on hold and ask patients to step aside so they can handle the packages. Jumping the line is fine, coming up behind a busy receptionist is not.
Our exam rooms are right there so if the doc happens to step out of a room after a physical exam, the patient could very well be in a state of undress just as the doc opens the door and just as a UPS driver is invading our hallway.
Protected health information. The reason we have a door between the lobby and the hallway, and the reason we have our television turned up, and the reason we have that annoying glass you can’t hear through at the lobby counter, is so random people don’t hear all your personal medical info every time you visit our office. UPS driver doesn’t care!
Safety. The driver will usually enter the hallway backwards, lugging their roller in front of them. There is an exam room just a couple feet from the hallway door, and a driver who opens the door from the lobby side will likely pivot to their left, so that the first exam room is behind them. The point is that if they are rushing (and they do rush) in backwards they won’t see a nurse standing at the door to exam room 1. We haven’t had any accidents (fingers crossed) but we have had near-misses. Those nurses are sometimes carrying trays or sharps.
Additionally there is a fifth problem that we’ve had for almost two years now.
MASKS!!! UPS DRIVERS DON’T WEAR MASKS!!!
We treat patients with severe asthma and immunodeficiencies. 3/4 of our patients are geriatric. Some of our patients, especially during the big waves, only leave their house to visit our office because they are at risk and don’t want to die. There’s a huge sign on the door that says MASKS REQUIRED FOR ENTRY EVEN IF YOU HAVE BEEN VACCINATED.
We tell the drivers they can’t come in without masks. In the early days of the pandemic (2020) I was told UPS didn’t provide its employees with masks. Apparently UPS didn’t supply its drivers with hand sanitizer, either. Although to be fair, at the time both masks and sanitizer were scarce. The one driver who tried to work with us on these issues was pretty ticked off about that. I’m guessing she either quit or died that year.
UPS made a change at early on to suspend signature requirements. That didn’t change our local drivers’ behaviors at all, they would still barge in just to get the name. I guess in the past few months even that has been loosened. Now sometimes the driver will knock on our door and leave the packages at the door.
There are problems with this, too.
Most of those packages are very expensive refrigerate-immediately medicine. Costing thousands of dollars per box. Some we buy ourselves, some is shipped to us with the patient and/or their insurance footing the bill. UPS will leave it at our door in the hot Florida sun.
I think UPS is supposed to make sure we acknowledge the knock. They don’t, because again, the receptionist is sitting behind glass and the TV is on and the hallway door is closed. People in the lobby aren’t supposed to hear the receptionist talking and conversely the receptionist can’t hear someone knocking on the front door. If the receptionist is checking out a patient or otherwise busy it is easy to miss a package for hours, until a patient says “you have a box”.
Patients have tripped on the boxes left out.
The front door of one of our offices opens outward. Sometimes the boxes, which can be very heavy, are left directly in front of it such that the door cannot be opened.
On a couple occasions UPS has left packages after business hours on a Friday (we close early on Fridays).
Did I mention that many of these packages contain patient medication worth thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars?
And if the driver is in a rush, they will forget that we require masks, forget how to read, and barge in just like before.
Well, I don’t know your layout. Ring cameras, to use my specific example, can be set to a range. In other words, can be set to only alert to a person directly in front of the door.
That still may not be sufficient. So closed circuit camera that can be glanced at every once in awhile. We are talking about potentially 10s of thousands of dollars of stolen or spoiled patient medication right?
We have a very small porch with rails (the porch is shared with another office).
Also I’m more worried about spoilage than theft. So far, no packages have been stolen. And we aren’t liable in either case - the expensive medicine is packed into coolers with enough ice packs to last a couple days (possibly not shipping + a weekend though), and has a little device inside to tell us if it has been compromised by heat.
AFAIK, the camera can also be set to be activated only when someone pushes the button. Those drivers will likely ignore a “push button for delivery” sign, though.
Well, my biggest complaint against UPS (and FedEx) is that they never ring our doorbell. We have a security gate, and below that a curving stairway, so they have to perch the packages in front of the gate in the hope that they will be invisible from the street. Or for some they can toss them over the gate, but not very often (the porch structure covers most of the top of the gate). In contrast, our USPS package delivery nearly always rings the bell, probably because it seems to be the same person most of the time.
Anyway, these complaints are as nothing compared to the OP’s. Although OP did not ask me to resolve their problem, if it were me I would be tempted to have our lawyer contact the local UPS office and explain to them the liabilities that UPS might earn for not following proper procedures at a medical facility – at least I hope there are such liabilities. And then follow up every single time the UPS driver fails to follow procedures. Perhaps get your medical suppliers to weigh in as well, if they have any liability for unusable or stolen medications.
My opinion of most of these delivery drivers is that they are underpaid and over-scheduled, so they have a real struggle to delivery all of their packages in the time allotted (which means they probably end up working unpaid overtime). In other words, this kind of thing is the result of the company trying to make more money. They need to be shown how much money they can lose.
Have you reached out to UPS’s Customer Service and asked them to have the driver’s (or station or local or area or regional) manager contact you ?
Offering to buy the manager a cup of coffee and talk about your experiences might go a long way toward changing the behavior, ideally without pi$$ing off the chef before dinner is served
If there’s a problem I let the supplier know and they ship a new one. Most of the time it’s not something we pay for in the first place, it’s medicine our doctor prescribed that requires you to go to the doctor’s office for administration, so the insurance will only ship it to the doctors. There’s a whole process where we have to argue with insurance whether about medical necessity, and then once ins. is convinced that our doc made the right decision, they pay a distributor to send us the prescribed medicine.
(My aunt works with some company that contracts with Florida & other states to provide Medicaid coverage. She briefly mentioned to me that the specialty drug shipping situation is a nightmare for insurers.)
We try not to buy specialty meds unless a patient’s insurance won’t cover it any other way. Most things we purchase that are shipped by UPS come from OfficeDepot or similar - one time they left probably $100 worth of copy paper out on a day we closed early due to a power outage. I guess the lights came back on and they didn’t bother to read the sign or look inside. It rained later and the paper was ruined. OfficeDepot refunded us.
We also don’t ship out ourselves - very rarely we’ll send a small mailer bag. UPS doesn’t have much to lose directly from us.
And again, it’s not every day they remember not to barge in. Most of the time the driver will come in.
Talking to the UPS (local, regional, or national) management is attacking the problem from the wrong end. The OP is not contracting with the delivery company, so, while they will respond, all he is likely to get is lip service. They are not getting their money from him, so his bark has no bite.
Max_S needs to tell his vendor about this. They have influence. From what he has said, the shipping costs are not a major part of the total cost, so there is a solution, the vendor just has to be made aware that their current solution is not what their customer wants.
I used to work for a place whose supplier switched from commercial carriers to FED-EX Freight (these were commercial freight shipments). The first shipment was excellent. After that, it all went down hill. We did have special issues as the property owner did not allow 18-wheelers in the parking lot, which for the first delivery, they used a bob-tail, but subsequent deliveries were off their 18-wheelers. For their swan song, the driver refused to unload where I wanted (even asked me to assist him in unloading). Then, Fed-Ex tried to bill us for excess shipping costs (shipping costs were prepaid by our vendor). We contacted our vendor and told us no problem, no more Fed-Ex. The commercial freight guys were much more friendly and turned out to be cheaper.
So, to the OP, tell your vendor for these shipments to insist on signed delivery. It costs more, but it sounds as if that really isn’t the issue.
While that’s a very fair point, it runs the same risk: that Max’s account represents small revenue potatoes for the vendors who are shipping via UPS.
But I don’t think it’s an either/or.
One advantage of trying to go up the chain with ‘local’ UPS is that the carrot approach (probably the best approach for a UPS manager) has no downside. The (quite likely) stick approach that the shipper would likely either take or which would be implicit can either be saved for a next step or taken simultaneously.
That’s been my experience since COVID - in fact, most deliveries do not even involve ringing my doorbell, forget about a signature.(however, the tracking for some says “delivered to an individual” rather than accurately saying it was left on the front steps) But yesterday, FedEx attempted delivery on a package for my son - they would not leave it without a signature, so it seems like FedEX might be an exception
We will begin the process of reinstating our physical signature requirements for paid, premium signature requirements and commercial deliveries* across the U.S. by September 15, 2021 for the following signature types:
FedEx recently delivered an item that I had ordered for work (I can’t have things delivered to my office because half the time nobody is there, so they deliver to my house where at least my porch is sheltered and I have cameras). They required a signature even though it wasn’t a particularly valuable item. Which was frustrating because they attempted delivery when I wasn’t home, luckily their second attempt by coincidence I was home and could sign.
When I lived in L.A. I was expecting a very important delivery from UPS. I took the day off of work so that I would be there to receive it. I never left the apartment. When I went out to check the mail, there was a UPS notice saying ‘no one home’ and I’d have to arrange for another delivery or go to UPS to pick it up. The driver never came to my door. Let me tell you, I was urinated!. The apartment manager happened not to be home that day. She said the UPS driver would not attempt to deliver packages; he’d drop them all off with her.
For years I refused to use UPS. (Fortunately, the drivers up here are more conscientious. And it may help that I have a house instead of an apartment.)
