shipping
Awesomely-named reader DrSpaceMonkey tells us he shipped some stuff to himself during a move, discovered it was damaged, and now can't collect on his insurance.
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shipping
Alex shipped two packages to San Francisco from the
UPS store in Boston. One was delivered, the other wasn't—until without any explanation or notification, it arrived back at Alex's house in Boston on a FedEx truck. Huh?
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lost and found
UPS' website promises that they will deliver Corey's
Dell Vizio 37" LCD monitor tomorrow, which would be exciting, except the website has said the same thing every day for the past two weeks. UPS'
customer service representatives insist that the package is lost and that Dell needs to initiate a trace. Dell would be happy to accommodate—who wouldn't want to trace a lost package?—but their customer service representative claims that it's Dell policy not to initiate a trace until 48 hours after the scheduled delivery date, which according to UPS, is tomorrow.
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shipping and handling
UPS ruined this antique 1953 Willys Aero Wagon concept studio model by shipping it in three boxes taped together with packing peanuts and bubble wrap. UPS claims they can "pack almost anything," and that their "certified packing experts" "specialize in fragile and high-value items, including antiques." Whoops!
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above and beyond
Matthew isn't sure who got his order from
Threadless.com, but it wasn't him. UPS claims they delivered the package to Matthew's apartment, but the reception desk would've been closed during the supposed delivery time, and Matthew doesn't have his package. Rather than wait for UPS to complete its investigation, Threadless dug up an extra print of their sold-out design and sent it to Matthew, along with a little something extra...
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ftd
Ryan sent his father
flowers last December through FTD.com but they never arrived. Ryan apparently forgot to give his father's apartment number to FTD, and when UPS tried calling FTD for delivery instructions, rather than ask Ryan to clarify the address, FTD instead told UPS to chuck the flowers. None of this was apparently worth mentioning to Ryan, who just recently learned that his gift was never delivered.
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scams
By exploiting loopholes in their policies, scammers are using eBay,
Paypal and UPS to rip unsuspecting sellers off, like reader Chad. The buyer reported the item as "destroyed" and demanded and got a refund from Paypal. When the buyer shipped it back to Chad and he opened it, he found there was nothing wrong with it - except that the scammer had removed the memory, processor and hard drive. Now Chad is out $500 and left with a shell of a computer, and since the item was "received" Paypal won't do anything. His sad tale, inside...
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ups
Looks like UPS has set a guy on
Twitter to search for complaints and offer help as well as act as
customer service ombudsman. If that package just never seems to be coming or you'd like the guy to just stop
playing skeeball with it on your front porch, and regular customer service isn't of help, Thomas looks like your guy. In addition to being a web-dude at UPS, he's been blogging since '99 and founded a theater company in '06. Sounds like a cool cat to me. You need a real human being non-drone your face-fronting Twitter presence. He's
ThomasAtUPS on Twitter.
ups
Reader Michael wants to know why it's taking UPS almost a month to ship his daughter's Christmas gift from Los Angeles to Seattle. Michael thinks his package might have been eaten by the snowstorm that broke Seattle a few weeks back, but UPS swears that they have the gift and that this is all a simple matter of "the driver forgot to put it on the truck." Worried that it that it might have been faster for a messenger to walk between Los Angeles and Seattle with his daughter's present, Michael decided to launch an Executive Email Carpet Bomb at UPS executives.
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dumb
Adam asked
UPS to hold a package at his local facility because he knew he would be out of town. UPS sent Adam a confirmation message saying they would hold it for five days. Instead, they twice tried to deliver it to Adam a few hours later. Then they marked the package as refused by receiver and sent it back to the shipper.
racism
A
UPS driver entered a Sikh man's name as TERRORIST on its online package-tracking database. The man's family discovered the epithet when they searched for a package UPS failed to deliver.
shipping battle
In the battle of the overnight shipping, which service reigns supreme? Is it
FedEx? Or UPS and its long-haired whiteboard dude? Or the folks in blue at the Postal Service?
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ups
Luke writes, "I recently had a package delivered to me by UPS, and by 'delivered' I mean that they left a little yellow slip stating that they showed up and left." Thanks to a burst of anger, he figured out how to get past the phonebot that intercepts calls. It turns out you don't even need to add the curse word to the end.
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ups
Matt didn't order a broken 42" plasma TV, and he didn't ship one either, but that didn't stop UPS from plopping a big box with a broken TV on his porch, a service for which they charged $120.12. UPS explained that the TV Matt didn't ship was being returned to him by the recipient because it was damaged, and it was now his responsibility to arrange for re-delivery. “If I was the shipper," asked Matt, who lives in Ohio, "why would the package have come from Ontario, CA, not Medina, Ohio?" The TV sat in the rain overnight, and it wasn't until Matt reached the local depot, where his father worked for 27 years, that he convinced someone to take back the mystery box. Two weeks later, a bill arrived...
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j crew
A dozen readers (and probably a couple of PR flacks) must have forwarded us J.Crew's email today, in which the CEO and president of the company extend a mutual apology for the non-workingness of their
"enhanced" website and call center. Oddly, the email simply asks customers to "bear with us" but doesn't offer any discount or sale. Well, maybe they figured driving more traffic to a broken site would only make things worse.
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j crew
Kimberly, a frequent J.Crew
online customer, placed an order on June 30th for five items from their newly revamped website. In the past, writes Kim, "it usually takes 2 days at the latest for me to receive any shipment that is not backordered." This time it's been 2 weeks, and not only has nothing arrived, but the UPS tracking number they've assigned her order is invalid (it doesn't even follow the UPS numbering style). The unhelpful J.Crew customer service rep told Kim that they had her correct address and to wait 10 days before calling back. In the meantime, one of the items has already been returned and refunded to Kim's credit card—although about $200 worth of merchandise has still been shipped to some as yet undiscovered location.
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ups
A mysterious sounding reader known only as "sonic boom" emailed the tipline today, asking for advice on how to get UPS to stop forging his (?) signature when leaving packages with the local florist. We say Mr. Boom should consider himself lucky... we can't even get UPS to ring our doorbell. Ever.
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