I live in the middle of “flyover country” so they really don’t care. They just repeat the mantra that it is getting to me in 2 to 4 days. Sometimes it takes them so long to ship it, they 2 day air it. It has never been late based on when they ship. It just sits in their warehouse for several days.
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Wait! There is such a thing as “cat music”?
Don’t get me started on USPS, UPS or FedEx in that order.
That is hysterical.
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For your amusement.
The saga is nearly ending. Hopefully I receive the correct item in new condition so that it will not need repeating (aaaaargh!).
It looks like Amazon’s expansion of their in-house shipping currently has issues (not enough drivers/tractors to haul those filled trailers in a timely manner?).
Prime un-cancelled as I realized that I was still getting a nearly-half-price discount and also that my Prime credit card would lose the 5% cash back on Amazon orders, which more than pays for that discounted Prime price.
C’est la vie. First world problems.
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My last UPS/USPS handoff started with pickup in Des Moines, IA going 244 miles north to Minneapolis, MN, then 378 miles south to Omaha NE ( 135 miles due west of Des Moines) then 887 miles southwest to Midland TX
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Ha ha!
I’ve got one for y’all…
So my fiance works at a UPS Store. Every day when she gets home, I ask her if there were any interesting stories from the day. There nearly always are. (Among my favorites was the guy shipping a huge glass carboy of olive oil in a thin cardboard box with the instructions, “Just keep it upright”, the telephone fights with corrupt customs officials in distant 3rd world nations and this one lady who dropped off a giant Ms. Pacman video/pinball machine without any packaging. There are SO many crazy stories from the shipping/receiving world of a UPS Store franchise.)
UPS can be pretty great, and for the record, I let my Canada Post mail box rental lapse and paid for two years for a new box at my fiance’s location; they receive packages from anyone, not just Can Post, and they go above and beyond to make sure stuff gets to where it’s going.
Anyway…
Amazon is infamous for its penny pinching practices. In the case of my region, they’ve contracted with a company called “Intelcom”. -Which is basically the Uber of shipping. They pay regular people .73 cents per package to drive around in their personal vehicles and make drop offs. Anybody can get the job, which is good because turnover is incredibly high. My fiance says they’ve never seen the same driver more than once. -The economics work out so that a driver is barely able to pay for the gas mileage, let alone wear and tear on their cars.
They’ve seen packages delivered to the most insane places. -One time, Intelcom claimeded, “Packages delivered” when the receivers hadn’t gotten them. Two weeks later, a mall maintenance worker came in with a handful of these lost packages saying he’d found them in one of the big yellow salt bins out in front of the mall.
The business model of Intelcom is, as far as I can figure, the company owner takes a cut of the delivery fee billed to Amazon, and just burns through naive immigrant workers who are fresh to the country and take the job for a few days before working out the exploitative math and quit. Harvesting naivete for profit. This is the last step in about half the packages arriving from Amazon.
One time, a bank ordered a dozen iPads which were delivered and left on the sidewalk in front of their location in a bad section of one of the more rough towns. They were stolen by sunrise. I idly wonder if any of these drivers have worked out that they could drop off a package, photograph it, thus providing proof of delivery, and then just have an accomplice collect it up after they leave. -Though, even that seems like a zero-sum game, given that you’re now in the fencing-random-junk business with no guarantees of profit for your input time and effort.
I’ve also idly thought that a great TV show would be set in a UPS Store location and feature some of this insane nonsense. -A world of corrupt madness with a grimly determined staff who engage in creative fights to make sure customers are served well. Also, the cast of random weirdos who frequent the location would make for colorful episodes.
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There’s one like that in the States that I complained about before: OnTrac. The cheaply contracted drivers figured out that they can get by better on the meager pay if they hold everything until they have enough for it to be worth it in rural areas (specifically SW Arizona). So they lie about deliveries and actually deliver a couple days later. Amazon is one of the ones that will not use them in the US (Walmart does, as did Chewy.com, et al).
UPS drivers did the same occasionally in the very rural area of the national park where I volunteered a few years (eastern Nevada). FedEx and USPS did not. UPS stopped doing that last year after I told the park supervisor. Small towns and everyone knows everyone so I guess some boss got embarrassed and put a foot down.
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It was great when I lived in Japan. Even in the countryside, ‘free’ delivery would come in two to three days. And they would go out of their way to get something to you (at least one attempt a day for a few days - I had three attempts on one day a few times!)
Back in old Blighty… It’s a mixture of luck and how much the sender paid for delivery.
Some like Yodel, well they might throw it on your roof if you’re lucky, or leave it with a ‘neighbour’ half a mile away. Usually they’ll just say they tried and not delivery it.
If you get DPD, DHL (usually), FedEx, etc. though, then they’ll make a decent effort. You certainly pay for that (generally the more expensive retailers use proper courier services).
Luckily where I am now, because it’s an island, it all gets subcontracted to a local company who actually know the ferry times and the local area. And also the absolute nightmare they’d face from an island community if they failed to deliver… (seriously, don’t mess with islanders). Delivery charges do fairly often tend to be a little more though, but at least you get your stuff.
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As mentioned before, my BIGGEST beef is with the good old US Postal Service, but shortly after Christmas last year I saw the funniest (near riot) at a UPS drop-off. A person at the front of the line had a laundry basket of clothing items. They were “drop and UPS will pack” items, but I swear each item was going to a different store with different QR codes she had to look up individually - caused a near riot in the line until they dug up a couple of more clerks to try to get the line moving again.
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Could’ve been Amazon try before you buy. I just did that for the first time with three pairs of shoes and the two pairs I sent back had individual QR codes and I had to make sure I got the right one at the UPS Store since I returned them both at the same time.
Even if you order try before you buy items one after the other within a few minutes they are each going to be a separate order. You can’t put more than one in the cart.
Actually better for the environment. Unfortunately these days we want it now now now. Not a criticism because I’m guilty of the same.
Oh, speaking of shipping, ordered a bunch of stuff on Amazon-sub-prime for delivery a week later on Friday. I won’t be home for a few more days, so that’s perfect. Result: Amazon delivered yesterday, four days before the promised delivery. So now several items that I actually do need are sitting unprotected on my doorstep. Yay.
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That’s not the part I’m complaining about. If they want to gather them together for rural delivery, they just have to say so ahead of time and I can decide if I want to go with them or try someone else faster and maybe paying extra. It’s the lying about delivery and me searching all around and checking neighbors and so forth for an hour or two and then sweating and worrying about my package being stolen or something… 
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Have had that with UPS at times as well - said they “Left it next door.” when my wife was there the whole time - then ran them down to a local Whataburger where they were just hanging out and my item was still on the truck…
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This is a new one for me. I clicked a product link for something I had ordered, and the top result for buying is “buy used” in fairly small font, with a normal looking “add to cart”. I wonder how many end up accidentally buying a used product.
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I think that happens when they don’t have any new ones in stock. Amazon is wild now. You always have to check the ships from and sold by to make sure you’ve got a chance at getting a legit product.
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I think something is weird at Amazon’s El Paso, Texas, facility. I ordered a TPU back cover for my new Kobo Clara 2E on May 15—for some reason only one offering exists in the entire world—shipped by Amazon and it didn’t say it was backordered, though I suppose it must have been since it was going to take two weeks.
If I ordered it today it would be 2-day:
And after five days of “shipped”, sitting in the trailer in the El Paso parking lot, it actually moved to my local post office yesterday. It should deliver today if things were normal, but…
What the heck?! If that’s correct I could get it faster by ordering it today! This is sooo FUBAR.
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Nope - just good old USPS at its best - how many businesses can you name that have steeply declining service yet sharply increase prices without concern?
Any and all airlines.
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It wasn’t USPS that had it sit in the El Paso parking lot of the Amazon fulfillment center in El Paso for five days (again). That’s Amazon’s own shipping service, called the “partner” in the tracking. Amazon has been working on doing their own deliveries both locally and longer distance to cut costs. USPS didn’t get it until yesterday, 14 days after I ordered it. It was an Amazon truck (or contractor) that moved it 150 miles from El Paso to Silver City yesterday.
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