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Stupid Delivery Stories
I have some.
We get a lot of deliveries, to the point that we know many of the drivers by name. We leave a garage door open for deliveries whether we are home or not. However, that doesn’t stop some delivery drivers from making boneheaded moves.
One driver left our nearly $200 order of Omaha Steaks by our mailbox — in July. They weren’t stolen but the meats had begun to thaw, so I quickly ushered them into the freezer. Needless to say, when I got a hold of FedEx (wasn’t easy), and explained what had happened, I wasn’t offered any “We’ll fix that.” OTOH, it hasn’t happened since.
Another time, we came home to find a note taped onto the garage door. It was a form saying that an attempt to deliver a package was made, but the house could not be located. Now, neutral observer doesn’t cuss often, but when she does, it’s usually aimed at Yours Truly. This time, however, we both lost it. We have two signs with our house number on them, one with an arrow. Anyway, we had to go to the mother ship (local distribution center) to get the package.
The latest was last week, which is what prompted me to write this post. Our middle daughter turned 31, and I was expecting her present to be delivered that day (the tracker said “out for delivery”). I heard neutral observer scream from downstairs, so I rushed down to see what happened. In her hands she held a crumpled up package, no doubt the present. “I backed over it by accident,” she said; but with anger, not remorse. She proceeded to tell me the package was not placed between our cars, as usual. Instead, this delivery driver put the package directly behind neutral observer’s right-rear tire. It wasn’t visible when she got in on the driver’s side and started backing out. Fortunately, there was zero damage to the contents, so the party proceeded without a hitch.
Do any of you all have a stupid delivery story?
Published in General
We had a delivery truck try to make a 3 point turn in the muddy field, got completely stuck. I had to come home from work and pulled him out with my tractor.
While the next story isn’t a stupid delivery story, it is a stupid GPS story. Our local landscape supply store also performs snowplowing and salting services for local businesses. During the last storm a few months back, the store director of operations filled in running the salt truck when a couple of employees failed to show up. He was supposed to salt the parking lot of the storage rental units about 1/4 mile up the road, but instead, he turned onto our private gravel lane, and then tried to turn around in the field.
Now he was out pre-dawn, so it was dark when this happened, but at 8:00ish
AM, this is what I found. He abandoned his truck at some point and walked out. LOL. He claimed that his GPS told him to turn down our drive.
Years ago, there was a delivery company called RPS. They were trying to compete with UPS but were pretty awful. Then FedEx acquired them and turned them into “FedEx Ground”; unfortunately the change of brand didn’t help. In my experience, classic FedEx (the overnight service) is still very good, but FedEx Ground is terrible. I cringe when I see that something I ordered is being shipped using that service. I have multiple stories of packages going missing or being reported as delivered when they weren’t.
I once ordered a new smartphone, which I was expecting the day before we were to leave for a long weekend out of town. I received a notification that the phone had been delivered, but it hadn’t. I called FedEx, but it quickly became apparent that the customer-service person had no information other than the same tracking page I was looking at. They ended up reporting the package as lost, and told me someone would investigate and get back to me. I had hoped to take the new phone out of town with me, but we had to leave without it.
Then, when we got home on Sunday night, there was a box on the porch. The driver had apparently falsely reported the phone as delivered, but it was still in the truck; after I called and made trouble, he came back and delivered it. And it had been sitting on the porch, unattended, for three days.
Equally bad is the U.S. Postal Service, although it may just be that we have a lazy and incompetent carrier. He routinely crams oversized packages into our mailbox, even if he has to bend them to make them fit, just to avoid having to come up the driveway. On at least two occasions he has left “delivery attempted” slips in our mailbox despite the fact that we were home all day; it’s less work for him to just pretend he tried to deliver the package and let us come to the post office to pick it up.
The problem with the delivery business is that those of us who receive deliveries have no say in which carrier gets chosen, so it’s not like we can take our business elsewhere. We just have to hope for the best.
The new Atlanta area Palmetto Warehouse is just bonkers. I have tracked a package that was there, 50 miles from my house, off to Las Vegas, then off to North Carolina, then back to Palmetto then to me.
I sell Alaskan seafood, mostly at local farmers markets in the Austin, TX area. I also offer shipping. A couple years ago I had an order that was local-ish but it was a particularly busy week and I did not have time to deliver it. (The customer was in South Austin and we were in a suburb a couple towns north of Austin at the time.) I packed up the order and dropped it at the local FedEx for overnight delivery. That overnight delivery took, IIRC, five days to reach the customer. By the time it was delivered the frozen salmon was….no longer frozen. It was quite putrid by then. FedEx refused to refund or pay for the lost product even though I purchased insurance on the shipment. Total disaster. I have actually had multiple instances of overnight shipments taking three or more days to be delivered by FedEx.
At least you’ve never returned a cat to an Amazon warehouse.
Back in the days when Pratt Hobbies was keeping me busy, I once got a big box from Canada via UPS that someone had rammed the tines of a forklift into the side. This is not healthy for cardboard tubes. UPS never paid up, and since then I have avoided using the United Parcel Smashing Service whenever possible.
I have been quite happy with Priority Mail, at least when I was in Virginia. When I moved back to my tiny western NY home town, I had to adjust to getting things to the PO in the morning so they could be sorted onto the noon truck, or they would spend the night here in Lyndonville. Still more convenient than UPS. I used to order stacks of the free Priority Mail boxes; not so much these days, but I still use them. I’ve only had one order get lost that I can remember. After seeing the pictures of those train cars busted open and the contents spread around at the rail yard near LA, I think I’ve been lucky.
I was working “out of office” so that while my office was in Dayton, Ohio I was operating out of Dobbins AFB (as it was known then). This meant that my twice monthly paycheck was being FedExed to me. As there was no one there to sign for the delivery, the FedEx guy left his “Failure to Deliver” notice on the door of my apartment. I’d fill out the form to leave it by the door. The next day FedEx would pick up the notice. The next day my check would appear. Usually. When check processing ran “unexpectedly” late, things would be pushed back a day, so instead of having the check in my hot little hand on Friday, I’d get it on Saturday, after close of business at the bank. Repeated remonstrances on my part finally moved my employer to institute direct deposit.
The funny part was that sending it FedEx was supposed to be “more secure” than mailing it. If they had mailed it, it would have sat in a locked mailbox until I took it out. As it was, if everything worked, the check would sit at my door in an oversized red, white, and blue envelope. Yay, security.
I have found over many years of investigation that cake tastes just as good all mushed up in a bowl (even with tire imprints) as it does perfectly sliced and placed on a plate.
That’s perhaps an overstatement. Many times I find an option to select which carrier is used, based on how quickly I want something delivered, and how much I want to pay for that.
So “no option for carrier” might only mean “no option for carrier if I want free shipping.”
I was uneasy about Amazon deliveries sitting on my front step so a couple years ago I started having them delivered to an Amazon pickup location near my workplace. It was a drug store of some type, Rite-Aid or Walgreens or some such.
That was a mistake. Sometimes my packages were there, but the staff couldn’t make the computer system release them, and the merchandise went back to Amazon.
I went back to front step deliveries.
We get deliveries from multiple companies. Usually UPS and Fedex but have gotten DHL and some other company. Fedex has been the only offender. One time they bypassed the walkway to the front door and the garage doors and came up on the deck, around the sun room and planted some packages in the blind spot between the sun room door (I guess they decided that was the front door?) and the master bedroom window. I get some perishables routinely delivered and Fedex has found some creative ways to make it possible for me not to find something in the summer heat.
I guess we shop at different places. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an online merchant that lets the buyer directly choose which carrier you want to use, for a given shipping type. Yes, I might be able to choose overnight versus standard, but I don’t get any choice regarding which carrier they use for each. Most of the time you don’t even find out which carrier it’s going to be until you receive shipping information.
EDIT: But I take your point; I do have some say. If I hate the standard-shipping carrier enough, I could always choose to pay a premium for overnight shipping I don’t actually need. I’ll admit, I’m usually not willing to go that far.
First, some news stories to break up the horror.
Our daughter lives in a small relatively isolated town, and has had the same UPS driver for over five years. He greets or waves at our grandchildren when he sees them all over town, as he has seen them from infancy, and has fun with them when he needs their mother’s signature for wine deliveries. There have been more different FedEx delivery drivers, but both the UPS and FedEx delivery schedules are so predictable, our daughter knows almost exactly when to expect a delivery.
A nice postal service experience was many years ago Mrs. Tabby and I bought our first house, which happened to be across the street from a house in which my brother had years earlier rented a room while in college. When someone using a very old mailing list sent something to my brother at that house long after he had moved out, the USPS carrier recognized the common surname and asked us if it was ours.
Same USPS carrier, on the day my state attorney license exam results were due to be delivered (for you young’uns, yes we had to wait for snail mail to get test results), a friend telephoned that she had gotten her results, and had passed. I had not received mine yet, but I saw the carrier on the opposite side of the street, so I ran across and shook him down for my mail, which he obligingly provided. (Yes, I had passed.) He seemed to find it amusing seeing me ripping open the envelope in the middle of the street.
We now live in a relatively new subdivision of nearly identical tract houses on narrow lots. Five parallel streets, each with the same series of house numbers. It is common for delivery people (FedEx, UPS, Amazon, WalMart, UberEats, DoorDash, etc.) to leave stuff at the right number but wrong street. Within the neighborhood we’ve gotten pretty good at getting such misdeliveries to the proper recipient. But in the neighborhood Facebook group, there are still the pleas of “Amazon says they delivered my package, but it’s not here. Does anyone recognize the porch in this Amazon photo?”
The first 18 months we were in the house, when our street was brand new and before it appeared on all the electronic map programs, we had repeated problems with deliveries going to a street in a very different part of town, which street has a name that differed from our street name in only one letter. The then-occupants of the house on that street with the same number as ours were very cooperative to let us know when she got a delivery intended for us.
Not exactly a “stupid” delivery story, but one I enjoyed.
Four years ago for my birthday I ordered a new golf bag from Dick’s Sporting Goods. After about a week I checked the shipping status, and it was still sitting in the California origination site. I called, and they said it must be lost, we’ll send another one.
Three days later the Fed Ex truck pulled up and left on my front porch — you know it — two golf bags. I called Dick’s and they said no problem, just go to our website and print out a return label, then drop it off at a local Fed Ex site. There was one in a Walgreen’s not far away, so I did it.
About two weeks later I was checking the credit card account and saw a credit for the exact amount I was originally charged for the bag. So once again I called, told them the story, and the guy said “Hmmm let me talk to my supervisor.” After a few minutes he came back on, told me there was nothing he could really do because there was no existing order to charge, but to “Have a blessed day.”
Free golf bag!
When I was a young man Marvel Comic mailed me the original art from a poster by John Byrne and Duffy Vohland. It was mailed in a large manila envelope with cardboard to prevent bending. The mail carrier, for the only time ever to my recollection, chose this moment to force a 14×11 envelope through a 6×2 mail slot. The feat was accomplished by spectacularly destructive means. Thankfully, there were no tears, just epic crumpling, which is still evident fifty years later.
Yep I had that happen occasionally at my last place in Phoenix, same numbers on multiple streets… Also in Phoenix (and probably other parts of Arizona too) you might have the same street name/number, but different “suffix.” For example, 32nd Avenue, Street, Drive, Way, Lane… Some were adjacent, some were on the opposite side of town…
(I’ve seen enough videos to pick up that such problems might be even more common in Atlanta, where like every other street might have “Peach” somewhere in the name. Occasionally that has resulted in the wrong house being torn down, etc.)
There were also some landlords who would make out rental agreements for their properties using the wrong street names. That caused some problems for those renters, when the city would turn on water service for a place on the wrong street.
It actually saved me money a few times though, like if UPS would deliver an ebay purchase to the wrong street. I would have reported it as lost/stolen, and by the time the people who got it realized where it should go and brought it to me, I already had received a refund.
Obviously you sent back the one you’d paid for, and the “replacement” was free. :-)
My best value shipping screw-up was probably around 2015 or so, a mint condition JVC JA-S77 integrated amp and matching JT-V77 tuner from ebay, both top-of-the-line in about 1978. UPS delivered to the wrong address (same number, wrong street…) and I did go there to check, but the people there said they hadn’t received anything. So I reported it/them lost/stolen. But apparently the people I talked to were not the “adults”/”owners” of the place, and several days later the actual person “in charge” there brought the box to me. But by then I’d already gotten the refund. For some reason, the UPS driver couldn’t remember where he’d delivered it, or something.
As shown on the front of this brochure, with details inside:
We had lived at our current address for abut two years.
UPS pulled up one day, and as I viewed it while I was in the back yard, busy training the dog some tricks, I didn’t pay attention to what was going on.
Later on, when I finally got to the driveway, there was probably 2,000 bucks worth of expensive lawn furniture. The lawn umbrella, the package with the glass table insert, about 40 parcels containing gidgets and gadgets to help assemble the six chairs, the various packages with the redwood chairs, etc.
I knew it was about to rain. So I loaded up my van and put everything inside and took it to the address clearly printed on each and every one of the packages. That address was about a block away.
The next time I saw the UPS driver I explained how much work he had made for me. He simply grinned and said, “Well you accepted the delivery so how is it my fault?” (I was hoping for a thank you, but, oh well.)
UPS finally has some good drivers on our route, but that guy remained in their employ for the next 5 years at least.
A writer has posted a “Your GPS is Wrong” sign at the entrance to his access road, due to all the lost visitors.
Let me tell you about publishing company art departments: They have a history of non-cooperation in returning commissioned art to the artist. (Is that because the publishing industry is full of sleazebags, or because they’re all in New York?) Don Maitz has related how, after he repeatedly called and wrote demanding the return of his paintings, the art departments would fold the paintings in half before mailing them. He thought he’d solve that by painting on masonite, but the art department then sawed the painting in half.
We got saved from that happening once because we have weird parking habits. Unlike most of our neighbors, we park both cars in the garage. Of course many of our neighbors have as one of their vehicles a full size pickup truck, and there’s no way the 20 foot by 20 foot garages will hold a full size pickup and any other car. The other weirdety is that we walk into the garage by going out our front door and walking through the roll-up door of the garage. The direct entry from the house goes through the laundry room, and that’s kind of a tight space to walk through. Anyway, by approaching the cars through the roll up door, we inherently see what’s adjacent the car and in the driveway, which one time was a package that had been left in front of the roll up garage door instead of on the front porch of the house. Our front porch even has a conveniently large pillar behind which packages can be placed so they are invisible from the street.
I stopped having USPS trouble when I moved out of the city.
Expecting a refurbished laptop (FedEx notice said “out for delivery” “between 11:30 am and 3:30pm,” “direct signature required”), I rushed early to get my errands done and got back at 11:03am.
Whereupon I found the notice and door tag the FedEx driver had left at 10:54am.
Not too inconvenient, I just had the package redirected to a local FedEx store and picked it up the next business day.
But when I am given a 4-hour window for delivery, it is unhelpful to show up 37 minutes before the window opens.
I expect they gave themselves the out of calling it “expected” rather than “guaranteed.”
Indeed. It was exactly what I “expected” as well, to my chagrin. But NBD.
How about some dumb shipper/receiver stories?
At a company I used to work at, we had a receiver who celebrated April 20th by signing all deliveries “Adolf Hitler”… (he had only been with the company a short time when this happened) However one of the drivers happened to be Jewish and complained…
When the management went back and checked the paperwork, they confirmed it and fired him.
A waybill is an official document – and by signing a false name to it, he committing forgery…
YouTube is full of security camera videos of delivery drivers doing all kinds of strange things…But receivers probably get away with a lot – until someone complains.
It seems to be a rare occurrence to shop online or through a catalog and be able to choose which delivery service that you want.
The fact is that different services cost different amounts. As mentioned before, you often do have a choice of delivery service, depending on how much you’re willing to pay. Do you expect to be able to select a delivery service without any change to the price? It’s pretty common for a business to offer “free shipping” only with a particular service that they’ve made a deal with.
Or maybe the issue is when a business doesn’t offer a delivery service you prefer, at ANY price. That could be for a variety of reasons, including locations, contract terms, etc.
That might mean getting what you want, from a different provider that includes the delivery service you prefer. i.e., get your cat food from chewy.com instead of walmart.com or amazon.com. If chewy offers the delivery service you prefer, but the others don’t.
I’m not sure it makes sense to expect a particular company you want to deal with, to offer a particular delivery service you want.
I have a veritable plethora of “Stupid GPS stories,” as I live on a narrow, little-traveled country road that happens–if you look at a map and ignore the size and trajectories of the actual roads, but just imagine a crow flying–to be one of a convenient connecting series of roads between PA State Route 40 and Interstate 70.
For the first fifteen or twenty years we lived here, it was a gravel road.
In keeping with the rest of life in these parts, cellular and directional technology doesn’t work very well, and GPSs of all sorts are happy to send large, long, vehicles my way on what they think is a nifty little shortcut between 40 and 70, even those that can’t possibly maneuver themselves around the hairpin bend at the end of my driveway. This happens with some regularity, and has, on occasion, taken hours to resolve. Meanwhile, I can’t go out, or get home, and no-one else can use the road.
Most memorable was the Greyhound bus that got stuck one weekday afternoon. I got home from work to find that I couldn’t get into my driveway, and that Mr. She (who’d retired by then) was serving up tea and cookies, and offering our bathroom’s services, to the nice elderly folks who were stranded out here in the sticks.
The USPS, UPS, and FedEx guys are pretty good about deliveries. They know about the dogs, except when one of them doesn’t, and–rather than leaving the package safely outside the gates–will open the gate and leave it actually in my driveway. Thus Levi and Xena discovered the box of delicacies that my friend had sent me a few years ago, ripped it apart, and had themselves a lovely little party consisting of muffins, croissants, crumpets, smoked salmon and a few other delights. All that was left was a jar of cherry jam which, if I’d not discovered their depredations in time, they’d probably have figured out how to get open and eaten too.
They were inordinately pleased with themselves, and beyond grateful at my thoughtfulness and consideration in sending them such a lovely present.
I don’t seriously expect anyone to offer that as an option; I understand why it makes sense for the shipper to do business (maybe even under contract) with one carrier. I’m just saying that this arrangement is sometimes frustrating for the customer.
At the very least, it’s information I’d like to have. If I had a choice between two merchants selling the same product at the same price, I might well choose the one that ships with UPS over the one that ships with FedEx Ground, purely because of my experience with both carriers. As it is, you don’t necessarily know. Some shippers tell you which carrier they use, others don’t.