UPS Says My New iPhone Is Almost Here — Oh Wait, They Left It Back In Korea
The black line traces the route that Clint’s phone actually took. The remaining red line is the route that UPS assumed the phone had taken until realizing that it was still sitting back in Korea.
As you can see from the screengrab of the tracking info below (which we’ve confirmed), Clint’s phone supposedly left the FoxConn plant in ZhengZhou, China, on Sept. 25, landing in Incheon, South Korea, on Monday and immediately flying off to Anchorage.
The next day it was in Louisville, meaning Clint should probably be playing with his new phone right now. But then he received a notice from UPS saying he won’t actually get the device until Oct. 6 because “We were unable to load the package on the plane as scheduled.”
Anyone who work at UPS or one of its competitors want to offer an explanation for how something like this could happen? Shoot us an e-mail at tips@consumerist.com.
We and Clint are assuming that his phone was part of a large shipment of devices that were being tracked under some sort of bundle number but it wasn’t until that bundle got to Louisville, where it was presumably to be broken up and parceled out to the final destinations, that someone realized it was missing some stuff.
UPDATES:
We’ve heard from people — none who work at UPS — who work in the shipping business and say that our assumption is likely accurate. It’s likely that UPS isn’t finding out about the missing items until things get to Louisville, where the company breaks up larger shipments into individual packages.
We’re also hearing from other customers who are in the same boat as Clint. Consumerist reader Scott ordered two iPhones. One, like Clint’s, was apparently not put on the plane in South Korea, but it’s the first one he ordered that has taken a truly insane route (though we’re guessing it never made most of these stops to begin with), being falsely tracked from China to Alaska to Kentucky to China to Korea to China to Korea to Hong Kong to Louisville:
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