My assumption is that a computerized system plans the day’s route for a given truck using the addresses of the packages on that truck to maximize efficiency. So, if there’s a list of addresses for that route, why can’t the delivery company generate a better estimated time notification than “by the end of the day,” or, “by 8pm.” They must know within 15 minutes when it should get here.
FedEx and UPS send me text message updates when a package coming to my house has been: picked up, scheduled for delivery, and out for delivery. That must show an interest in that aspect of customer service, so why not provide notice of a smaller delivery window?
I suspect that internally they can easily predict delivery time within 15 minutes or so.
I also suspect that careful market research has shown customers are happy when they consistently receive packages at or before a (somewhat vague) promised time, whereas they are quick to complain when a package estimated to arrive at 3:45 pm actually arrives at 4.
FedEx has it’s own way of doing things which was found on business deliveries, they even didn’t renew their Amazon contract, they don’t seem to really want home deliveries. Perhaps too many complaints if they don’t make that narrower delivery window, also perhaps they don’t want to meet the person, nor want the recipient to go out and seek the delivery person.
Why should they? My guess is that it provides then with flexibility in case they have a last-minute pick-up they need to make, plus weather impacts driving time and at least here in the mountains predicting bad weather is harder than it seems.
Amazon’s own delivery service will often show you on a map where the truck is when it gets near you. It will tell you that it is five stops away or that you’re next, for example. Not when it will reach you, just how many ahead.
I have found that trying to guesstimate how long it will take to get to me when it is x stops away is completely futile. It’s just all over the place. Some stops are short and some are long. Just the time it takes the driver to find and gather the packages for a stop is highly variable. Nevermind the rest of it.
(This is a USPS tale: last week the mail carrier took a very long time trying to find a package for me on the truck. Looked around the seat area, got out and looked in the back, got back in and looked in the seat area. Finally found it near the seat.)
There’s just a lot of variables, many of which can’t be predicted.
Xema’s answer probably is correct - but I think there might be another aspect. I remember when furniture an appliance deliveries required you to be available the whole day from 8am to 4pm or so. Now there is typically a much smaller window- and I’m fairly sure that it’s because people began flocking to the first business in their area with shorter windows. But Fed Ex is different for two reasons. One is people don’t typically stay home waiting for Fed Ex - if Fed Ex misses me, I can usually go somewhere to pick up the package and without the need to stay home and wait for the delivery, most people aren’t going to care if it arrives at 2 or 3 pm. But I can’t do that with a refrigerator. And the second is that I can choose where I buy my furniture from, but I often don’t have a choice in whether something is shipped to me UPS or FedEx,etc. IOW. I’m not their customer.
I complained about the very vague delivery window for UPS in my area (“between 9AM and 10PM”) for a package of documents I needed to sign for, meaning I had to stay tethered to the house all day.
The rep I spoke to was very candid, she said their main priority is their regular business accounts, not one off residential deliveries.
They do not give a more accurate time because (in my area at least) the delivery trucks don’t just deliver, they pick up business parcels as well as required. If they get a call for a pick-up that needs to go to their depot for immediate forwarding to an airport or sorting etc, that takes priority and they delay the residential delivery. During any given day, they have no idea of how many calls they will get so a delivery window is meaningless, or as Xema says, it will only piss people off when they miss it.
FedEx has been investing heavily in supporting e-commerce for their growth over the last decade, it’s been a primary focus for them.
The Amazon decision was related to low margins and a required massive increase in scale. In 5 years Amazon’s transportation costs will exceed FedEx gross sales and UPS gross sales (today’s numbers), that’s a lot of infrastructure combined with low margins.
Amazon is also ramping up its own delivery service, complete with next day deliveries in some cases. (I just got a $4 item yesterday delivered in one day.)
Amazon is becoming less of a customer to delivery services and more of a competitor.
The two biggest I can think of are traffic and weather, neither of which FedEx controls, either of which can throw a delivery schedule off significantly and Og help you if both happen on the same day.
As an Employee that sorts the FedEx Deliveries to our business; Ground delivery is all over the map. We sometimes get 40 packages delivered around 4 p.m.
I also read that Amazon was cherry picking deliveries for it’s own service (dense set of addresses) while giving the sparse addresses to FedEx and UPS which drives their profits down even further.
I think the problem is mostly things that have to be signed for, so it’s not so much the delivery speed that matters as the amount of time you have to be home with no other plans.
I’d be willing to accept slower overall delivery if I didn’t have to wait 6 hours to sign for a package.
I work 10 minutes from my house, so if they could give me a smaller delivery window during the day, that would be enough.
I bet it’s that, combined with some degree of variability- what happens if there’s a wreck, or the driver REALLY has to go to the bathroom, or some other unexpected event that might take 10-15 minutes. Or if the driver has to go into an apartment complex office and wait on someone to sign something. Or if they have a hard time finding a given address (it happens).
Giving you a more vague end-boundary or window allows for some of those sorts of events to occur and still meet the condition, while saying “Between 3:30-3:45” gives no slop whatsoever.
I do agree that they can do better than something as vague as “Wednesday by 8 pm”- that’s cable company style vagueness. I’d think they should be able to give you a say… 3-4 hour window.
Also note that a smaller delivery window is offered at a higher price-point from FedEx, so if you are willing to pay more the window can be much smaller.
For FedEx Express you can set a 2-hour delivery window and for Home Delivery you can choose between Morning, Mid-day, Afternoon, or Late Afternoon.
The “by 8 pm” guarantee is merely due to the package being shipped by the less expensive methods.
Note Tempe Jeff’s response. Once when I’d spent the day waiting impatiently for a UPS delivery scheduled “by the end of the day,” the driver told me my apartment complex is invariably their last stop, so I could expect deliveries between 5 and 6 PM, a much narrower window. I suspect FedEx works the same way: my neighbor uses FedEx a lot, and her deliveries usually arrive between 10 a.m. and noon. I think the routes are fairly fixed in a loop of set distance; if you can figure out when your neighbor’s get their deliveries, you may be able to better predict your own.
I’ve bought from one place multiple times in the past. Then one time I bought something & it wasn’t delivered; there was a note that I needed to go to the FedEx depot to pick it up because it required a signature. Apparently, it was over the threshold of the place I bought it from; however, this wasn’t noted upon checkout. Had I known, I would have done a different delivery address, either work or my neighbor who doesn’t work outside of home. IOW, it’s the retailer/sender who’s paying for it & they determine a lot of that.
I would very much appreciate info on how to access this. In my experience, Amazon is the weakest and least reliable of the delivery services and, on several occasions, logged “Delivery attempted & unsuccessful” for various reasons when I greatly suspect the real reason was that it was late and the driver wanted to record an attempt rather than the fact that they simply gave up.
The last time this happened, the note was “could not find secure place to leave package” which was strange considering a) people were home, b) No driver in the history of amazon has used this as a no-delivery excuse at my address and c) it was logged at 10:45 PM (amazon states that their latest deliver attempt is 9:45 pm.)
The last UPS delivery e-mail I received had a link to a driver location feature.