Last week, Jon kept receiving packages from drugstore.com that he didn’t order. He was confused, until some detective work solved the problem: a man with the same (relatively common) first and last names as Jon was staying at a nearby hotel, ordered the items, and an overzealous address correction system at UPS assumed that the package really belonged to Jon. What he wants to know is: who screwed up here?

12/10 I received a package from Drugstore.com delivered by UPS I was not expecting it and I have never shopped at drugstore.com before so I was a little confused as to why they where sending me stuff.

I opened the box and inside was a couple of sticks of deodorant, a couple boxes of Just for men hair coloring, and some vitamins. I take a look at the receipt in the box and notice my address is not on it, it has my name and town but the street address and zip code are different. I look at the box again and realize that UPS had put another address sticker over the original one and the new one had my address on it. So I decide to call my mother and ask her why UPS would put a different address sticker on the box (she works at a UPS store) and she tells me that they will do an auto address correction if they can’t find that address. I figure that makes sense even though the street address was no were close to mine.

So I call drugstore.com and right away speak to a nice CSR and let her know that the original shipping address on the package is wrong and that I had gotten it instead of the other guy with the same name. She asks if I would mind dropping it off at the post office if they sent me a corrected address sticker, I said I could do that because I had to go to the post office in the next few day anyways. She takes my address and says she will be sending out the new address label and we get off the phone. I put the package on the counter and forget about it.

Until yesterday 12/14 when I get another package from drugstore.com. So I open it up and it is the same exact stuff. I look at the receipt again and it has the same bad address on it. This time instead of calling drugstore.com I decide to google the address that was on the receipt. There was no match so I click on the first link that came up and its to a hotel that is in the area.

I then realize that the guy ordering this stuff put the name of the hotel instead of the name of the street but everything else was right. As it turns out I drive by the hotel on my way to work everyday so I figure I will do my good deed for the year and drop them off at the hotel on my way home from work the next day.

So today 12/15 I peel my address stickers off of the packages and take them to work with me. I call the hotel and they confirm that the guy with the same name as me is staying there (little scary how quick they were to confirm it but that’s beside the point). So I stop at the hotel on my way home and drop both packages off at the front desk and let them know who they are for and they said they will give them to him.

All and all I have spent 10 minutes of my time dealing with this so not a big deal to me at all, and I am assuming the other guy isn’t to upset about it ether because at most he was just a little stinky and a little gray for a couple of day but he got twice the amount of stuff that he ordered. My question is who is at fault for this guy not getting his stuff? Is it drugstore.com’s fault for not getting the guy’s correct address after I had told them it was wrong, or is it UPS’s fault for having a overzealous address correction system that wanted to give me all this guy’s stuff?

This sounds like it’s on UPS, but hard to believe that a hotel wouldn’t be in UPS’s system unless the original package recipient (the other Jon) didn’t know and thus didn’t use the hotel’s correct street address.

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