Which Shipping Company Is Kindest To Your Packages?

Ant writes "Popular Mechanics mailed a bunch of sensors on an epic journey to find out which American shipping company is the most careful with your packages. From the article: 'One disheartening result was that our package received more abuse when marked "Fragile" or "This Side Up." The carriers flipped the package more, and it registered above-average acceleration spikes during trips for which we requested careful treatment.' Here's what they found."

Comments

TSA

[smittyoneeach]

. . .will be kind to your package, as long as there is not too much junk in it.

Re:TSA

[Dayze!Confused]

When I worked at UPS I remember my foot going through a Dell package, they had pretty sturdy boxes, just not a match for my steeled toed boots...

Re:TSA

[Dhalka226]

I hear you're alright 99% of the time if you wrap your junk in a clear plastic bag before beginning the process.

Re:TSA

[PPH]

So, you're saying that TSA has something against large packages? Pretty insecure of them, IMHO.

captcha: throbs

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

That only works if there is less than 3 ounces of liquid in the junk in question.

Re:TSA

[MadnessASAP]

I currently work for a Canadian shipping company that handles UPS, Purolator, DHL and a bit of FedEx air freight across the country and I can tell you at 4 AM outside in the cold and rain after the 4000th 50lb supposedly fragile package it's REALLY hard to give a flying(get it? 'cause it's air freight) fuck about your shipment. And of course as they say in the article, express shipping (read: air freight) is expensive, to keep a reasonable profit margin sacrifices have to be made and so that although 1 in 1000 might get damaged the other 999 make it to their destination on time and in one piece.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

I tell you, the CAPTCHA is keywords leaked from ECHALON system. They *know* your thoughts! :P

case and point, captcha: ADMIRE (the accuracy of the post? :)

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had couriers from UPS treat my packages like shit ... repeatedly, so your comment doesn't surprise me. The last time I had the misfortune of a shipper using UPS, the courier dropped one of my boxes -- on purpose, the bastard -- from a good 3-4 feet; the guy just didn't care. Is trying to damage packages part of your training manual or something? I've never had Purolator go out of their way to break my shit.

Re:TSA

[Anrego]

I actually don't mind this at all.. but I wish shipping companies did a better job of handling the aftermath.

I can accept that in order for me to have a package sent from somewhere in the bowels of the USA to my door step here in Canada within 2 days for under $50 .. some corners need to be trimmed. Trying to deal with UPS over the phone however is way too painful, and DHL is (in my experience) akin to eating a lightbulb.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, god forbid, we should expect employees to act like freaking adults while they're at work. I'm thinking these clowns need to find another line of work if they can't respect other people's property. Sheesh.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh yes, but then they can clearly see your nuts.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

His name is Michael Weinrich (atleast he claims to be). Does anyone know a canadian named so, and is in the shipping industry?

PS: mmm on second thought, his previous post indicate he might be lying about being in the shipping industry.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the X0's, as a student, I did an experiment with a package marked 'fragile' with an accelerometer inside. It was USPS, as most of the others didn't exist then, but the drop record was 33 feet.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

    I break that rule constantly. There's way more than 3oz in my junk of either blood or semen. Then again, I'm an award winning porn star. I guess the same doesn't apply for the rest of you schmucks.

    I've had all kinds of requests on handling my junk. Condoms are requested. Clear plastic bags? Not so much. There was this one chick that .... well, I'll leave it up to your imagination.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

This is good. I worked for the TSA (actual TSA) and suitcases marked fragile were treated extra rough. I remember watching co-workers throw boxes that said fragile onto the ground. Lots of "let's see how far I can throw this package" plenty of times. I'd see stuff they'd break leaking through boxes.

tl;dr TSA busts your junk

Re:TSA

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I would LOVE to paint the word 'fragile' across my buttocks and let you handle me. Brown can definitely do something for me. And you can even wear your boots in my bed.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Wide nose
Nappy hair
Big gorilla lips
Small brains

You didn't look in the mirror while typing this, did you?

Re:TSA

[c0lo]

Tough shit you little pussy. It is not the customers fault your job is shit and you weren't smart enough to go to college

Wow. Do you suggest graduating a college boost you resistance to hypothermia? Or somebody (college graduate or not) would love to load parcels into the plane?

Because the cause that I see is: highly qualified or not, such a job would require better motivation for those doing it. Maybe if the company hiring them would spend a bit more from the money you(we) paid through the your(our) nose to pay the loaders better, the parcels will be better handled? Maybe the very company you think is slammed has part of the responsibility?

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

and I can tell you at 4 AM outside in the cold and rain after the 4000th 50lb supposedly fragile package it's REALLY hard to give a flying(get it? 'cause it's air freight) fuck about your shipment

Ya, well I paid a hell of a lot more money so you would give a fuck. Get a different job or move somewhere warm if your boss isn't paying you enough to care. It's call a work ethic, and we don't care how you feel about doing the job- do it or do something else but quit fucking with my shipping.
Asshole.

Re:TSA

[CAIMLAS]

99.9% 'fragile handling' doesn't bother me.

What bothers me is that sensitive equipment which can be inperceptively damaged by such handling is difficult to detect.

Specifically, hard drives. They are the basis of our society, and damage from improper handling can often take days, weeks, or months to determine after the fact. It is not fun to receive a box of disks which has been thrown, jostled, and dropped needlessly; you find out at 3am when several members of an array fail at the same time.

It's slightly different with 'whole' servers, or large disk boxes: they're bigger and heavier and therefore harder to just 'throw around'.

Computer component companies would be well served amongst professionals if they were to start adding accelerometers and the like to boxes containing multiple drives. Being able to tell upon receipt if the box has been dropped repeatedly or forcefully would be very nice to know indeed.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can tell you at 4 AM outside in the cold and rain after the 4000th 50lb supposedly fragile package it's REALLY hard to give a flying(get it? 'cause it's air freight) fuck about your shipment."

Boy, aren't you glad that pilots don't stop giving a flying fuck about your ass after 10 hours of flying? Or that the doctor doesn't stop giving a flying fuck about you after you've been bleeding for 10 minutes and (s)he's all messy? Or that after a long double-shift the guy building your car and assembling the brakes doesn't stop giving a fuck after a long 12 hour shift?

Fucking pussy. Suck it up. And stop breaking my expensive shit.

Re:TSA

[Xelios]

This is exactly right. I spent almost a year working at UPS while I was going to university as a "pre-loader", night shift loading the delivery trucks. The place was chronically understaffed, full of temp workers from work placement agencies, and far too small for the number of boxes we went through on any given night. Christmas time was the worst though. Our volume almost doubled, but our staff didn't, and neither did the time we had to get everything done. If anything we had less time due to the shift before us lagging behind because of their ridiculous work load.

The cars are all lined up along a conveyor belt, and your job is basically to stand by the belt, pick off every box that belongs on the 3 or 4 cars you're responsible for and load them into the proper position on the proper shelf. Sometimes the managers just want to "git 'r done", so they'll have the tractor trailers unloaded so fast that it floods the belt and nobody has any time to actually load their trucks. All the boxes are basically thrown off the belt into a giant pile outside the trucks, because there's no time to do anything else. And remember, this is all happening at 3 am in a warehouse largely open to the sub zero temperatures outside. Tim Hortons coffee was the only thing that kept us going.

It's probably worth mentioning that every second box is labeled as fragile, there's really no point anymore. If it really is fragile, then either ship it by air or throw some extra padding into the box. Aside from that, make the box interesting in some way. Paint it bright pink. Slap some funny comics on it. Anything to make it stand out and brighten someone's day a little. Those boxes will usually get the royal treatment, because at 4 am it's the little things that keep you going.

Lastly, theft was never really a problem where I worked. I know of one guy who was fired on the spot for taking a pack of gum out of a box that broke open as it was being handled with care. Though if someone wants to steal something and is smart about it, I think it'd be fairly easy to get away with.

Re:TSA

[gmhowell]

I think you mean he'll do something for your brown (eye).

Re:TSA

[imakemusic]

Do you suggest graduating a college boost you resistance to hypothermia?

Maybe college isn't such a bad idea.

Re:TSA

[c0lo]

Do you suggest graduating a college boost you resistance to hypothermia?

Maybe college isn't such a bad idea.

That's not my point.

My point: no matter the degree of the persons in charge of the freight, a way of motivating them to do a proper job is in the hands of the company - I fail to see how one can blame exclusively the handler and totally disregard the role of company.

To illustrate: you think the solution to have the parcels delivered undamaged is to have everybody get a college degree? Assuming this would happen... what, are the parcels magically delivered themselves in pristine conditions, no matter the weather or time of the day (night, for the matter at hand)?

Re:TSA

[Japher]

I think you missed the point. The comment about going to college wasn't meant to imply that a college degree will help you handle packages better. The idea was that if you go to college you won't have to take a job that required you to be out in the rain and cold at 0400. The main point, however, was that no matter what job you accept, you should be honorable enough to do that job well, even when the conditions aren't to your liking. You've accepted a wage to provide a service. It is now your responsibility to provide that service to the best of your ability. If your answer is "they only pay me $x/hr so I'm going to put my steel toed boot through your Dell" then you need to find another job. I used "you" in this post as a generic pronoun. I wasn't talking about YOU c0lo.

Re:TSA

[FuckingNickName]

The only whiny bitch here is the spoilt brat who spews random abuse behind AC because no-one will treat his precious Macbook with the respect it doesn't deserve while on a journey half way across the continent and in return for a price well below what it would actually cost to carefully move it from A to B to C to...

The guy is doing the job he is paid to do. You want to pay him to do what you think he should be doing, why not offer him a reasonable wage and working conditions to do it? Or do it yourself, you lazy little man.

You are the guy who shouts abuse at the waiter then gets piss in his soup. Actions have consequences, my spoilt princess. I'm also a privileged cunt and I've never had to do manual labour, though I did once do unpaid helping-out at a cybercafe managed by a friend, possibly the least difficult place in the world in which to wait tables. But it was still tough and I still learnt more respect for the guy at the other end of the transaction.

Sir, I wasn't so fucking insecure about my abilities that I felt the need to mock people for not having the "smart" to excel in higher academic education, in the same way that I don't mock the artist for not being a Fields Medallist or even the wheelchair-bound for not running a marathon. We're born different, we develop different strengths, yet we each have something to contribute: either enjoy the world or go back under your rock and dream about how you'd like your peasants to behave, you snivelling bedroom dictator.

Re:TSA

[Inda]

I saw this on the bottom of one package and it always makes me smile when I think about it:

If you are reading this, you need a hobby.

Yeah, the little things amuse me.

Re:TSA

[c0lo]

I think you missed the point.

Maybe.

The idea was that if you go to college you won't have to take a job that required you to be out in the rain and cold at 0400. The main point, however, was that no matter what job you accept, you should be honorable enough to do that job well, even when the conditions aren't to your liking. You've accepted a wage to provide a service. It is now your responsibility to provide that service to the best of your ability.

Totally agree: either you keep your part of the bargain or you get out of the bargain.

The original post made a total trash of the poster (on good grounds, I'm not denying it) and mentioned nothing about the responsibility of the company that hired the handler. I mean, the OP (shoutingly) "PAID FOR THE SERVICE", the only thing the post failed to notice: the OP paid the company, not the shity handler. Therefore, if the OP needs to shout to somebody, it is the company that need to be shouted to in the first place - it is the company that failed to keep their end of bargain with him.

As for the handler: with the attitude shown, I'm more affraid of a situation in which he would have had a degree (with the mindset at that time): having a job with more responsibility and adopting the position of "screw you" might have caused more damage. That's not to say his post doesn't worth the +X Informative: even if not pleasant, it cast a light on some reasons/causes for the situation; but who has the best chances to address it? (my point: it's still the employer).

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you missed the point.

Maybe.

You can't quite bring yourself to say "yes" can you?

Re:TSA

[quadrox]

While GP may have been a bit harsh, I think the OP deserved it (apart from elitism like talk about university).

If you take a job you are obliged to do it well. If you can't be bothered to do the job well, then get a different job. But as long as you have the job, you god damn well better do it right.

If you can't be bothered to do your job right, then in my book you are a complete asshole and deserve all the ill treatment and abusive posts you can get.

Re:TSA

[couchslug]

Thank you.

I'm sure that rant will cause OP to change his ways and handle every package as if it were Baby Jesus in swaddling.

In a world where the ruling class are rewarded for not giving a shit, why should he?

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you missed the point.

Maybe.

You can't quite bring yourself to say "yes" can you?

What it is to you, buddy? Can't you make your mind solely based on arguments? Do you need an admission from someone?
Think, buddy, think... and if you believe you have something relevant to say (even if controversial), say it and be done.

Re:TSA

[FuckingNickName]

If you can't be bothered to do your job right, then in my book you are a complete asshole and deserve all the ill treatment and abusive posts you can get.

(1) Throwing packages around at the fastest speed possible probably is "doing your job right". Remember that an employee of a courier is working for the business owner, not the customer. The target is probably "n packages delivered, not more than x% damaged" - not "n/10 packages delivered, everyone's precious Macbook unscratched".

(2) No-one is "obliged" to do anything well. There is no God in the sky instilling universal paternalistic values in you. Here's another philosophy: someone who is treated like shit ought to do the job badly until they're treated better, because otherwise people will get away with treating you and others like shit. Striking may be an option in some industries, but not everywhere.

As an extension of (2), if you want someone to do a job as well as you, make sure they're compensated as well as you. Supply/demand of skills may be relevant on a national scale, but to the individual what matters is whether his effort is worth his remuneration. If you don't like this, consider a less capitalistic model where a man works for more than himself.

Re:TSA

[ninja59]

Sounds like an excuse to me. In stead of taking it out on the packages, couldn't you request better work conditions? Glove, a jacket, portable heater? Divide that cost by the thousands of packages you handle per day and I don't think it would represent a price change. Every job has parts that you don't like, they wouldn't pay you if someone would do it for free.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

No-one is "obliged" to do anything well. There is no God in the sky instilling universal paternalistic values in you.

He may not be "obliged", but maybe the reason why he's loading packages at 4am in the freezing cold (a job he understandably doesn't like) is because he doesn't take any pride in his work to begin with.

Re:TSA

[FuckingNickName]

Maybe the reason there are more incarcerated blacks than whites in the US is because blacks are somehow inherently intellectually inferior and unable to apply themselves other than violently.

Or maybe not, and this is another case of a bigot using his prejudices to divine some sort of causation.

Re:TSA

[AmiMoJo]

I can accept that in order for me to have a package sent from somewhere in the bowels of the USA to my door step here in Canada within 2 days for under $50 .. some corners need to be trimmed.

Like the wages bill for the legion of highly trained and helpful staff you want to answer the phone? There is a reason we have to put up with shitty menus and recorded messages. Everyone wants the best deal and when looking at the cost of a service they don't factor in the value of support when things go wrong.

Re:TSA

[AmiMoJo]

If you hadn't noticed there isn't exactly an abundance of jobs available right now. We all have to work to put food on the table. Call me a socialist but I think it is a person's right to have a reasonable job where they get suitable protective equipment (like heated gloves) so they don't have to suffer for it.

Blame the shipping company for creating a shitty situation, not the unfortunate guy who is lumbered with it.

Re:TSA

[Abstrackt]

Because the cause that I see is: highly qualified or not, such a job would require better motivation for those doing it. Maybe if the company hiring them would spend a bit more from the money you(we) paid through the your(our) nose to pay the loaders better, the parcels will be better handled? Maybe the very company you think is slammed has part of the responsibility?

When I was in college my roommate had a job loading parcels, it paid more than double minimum wage and the only requirement was to be able to lift 20lb. I learned pretty quickly that "fragile" doesn't mean shit. Of course the company has responsibility but I think it starts with the hiring process, not the pay.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea was that if you go to college you won't have to take a job that required you to be out in the rain and cold at 0400.

I'm guessing you haven't graduated from college yet.

Re:TSA

[c0lo]

Because the cause that I see is: highly qualified or not, such a job would require better motivation for those doing it. Maybe if the company hiring them would spend a bit more from the money you(we) paid through the your(our) nose to pay the loaders better, the parcels will be better handled? Maybe the very company you think is slammed has part of the responsibility?

When I was in college my roommate had a job loading parcels, it paid more than double minimum wage and the only requirement was to be able to lift 20lb. I learned pretty quickly that "fragile" doesn't mean shit. Of course the company has responsibility...

I didn't say that the employer should have spend more money giving higher salaries, but increasing the motivation.

Let's go a bit in the details: quality is expensive, requires at least control (if not a well designed process to act on the prevention). Of course, being expensive, the corporates (mainly) substitute it with risk mitigation (instead of risk prevention): they take insurance, pay lawyers to defend them in case of claims and do the minimum so that they balance between price they charge, risks and costs. If you need citation: have it here. Or here for example in other industries,.

...but I think it starts with the hiring process, not the pay.

Yes, among others, they can address the hiring process. Or they can address the control/supervision (mainly during night shifts - this would be negative motivation). Or they can be picky when they accept parcels marked fragile but with shitty packaging. In any case, the company has more ways to address the internal issues and has to have more responsibility towards you, the customer... the obligation resulted from accepting a payment from you is with them and should stay with them. By contrast, the loaders have no obligations towards you, the customer (only towards their employers).

Put in short: I don't see why a simple loader with bad attitude deserves to be trashed (yes, he does) but the company that hires him doesn't deserve to be slammed.

Re:TSA

[bberens]

Let's face it, some people have work ethic and some people don't. If this person got a degree they'd have a bad attitude and crappy work ethic doing something more important. It's far better for them to be relegated to kicking boxes around. Those of us with a good work ethic busted our butts even when we had low paying jobs in high school and/or during college. Even without a degree a hard working person with a strong work ethic isn't going to have the crap shift working 4am kicking boxes. The GP has the cause and effect correct, just in reverse.

Re:TSA

[x0]

(2) No-one is "obliged" to do anything well. There is no God in the sky instilling universal paternalistic values in you. Here's another philosophy: someone who is treated like shit ought to do the job badly until they're treated better, because otherwise people will get away with treating you and others like shit. Striking may be an option in some industries, but not everywhere.

Yes, you are.

If you've applied for and accepted a job, you know full well what the job's requirements are before you start. Accepting a job with a package shipping company, you know you may be working outside, moving hundreds of packages, and when the fall comes around, it will likely be cold and wet. You also accepted the pay and benefits package, so bitching about the pay is on you. No one press-ganged you into that job; You have the freedom to vote with your feet and move on.

What does paternalism have to do with job performance? It sounds more like you have a surplus of entitlement and petulance unchecked by reality...

As an extension of (2), if you want someone to do a job as well as you, make sure they're compensated as well as you. Supply/demand of skills may be relevant on a national scale, but to the individual what matters is whether his effort is worth his remuneration. If you don't like this, consider a less capitalistic model where a man works for more than himself.

Compensation is based on what you do, and the level of responsibility you have when you accepted your job. Sure, the manager gets more pay than you. But, he or she has likely been there longer than you, and is responsible for getting the packages moved in, sorted, and out in a timely manner. If that doesn't happen with regularity, then that manager is unlikely to keep that position. You want more pay? Do your job well and get promoted.

Re:TSA

[SkyDude]

What bothers me is that sensitive equipment which can be inperceptively damaged by such handling is difficult to detect. Specifically, hard drives. They are the basis of our society, and damage from improper handling can often take days, weeks, or months to determine after the fact. It is not fun to receive a box of disks which has been thrown, jostled, and dropped needlessly; you find out at 3am when several members of an array fail at the same time.

I'm not going to make excuses for poor service, but items that can be damaged through normal (or abnormal) handling should be packaged to survive such a trip. Not only the exterior corrugated parcel but in the example you cite, drives need to be engineered to handle such potential shocks. Don't drives park the heads in a safe zone now? Or are you referring to the platters being damaged?

UPS offers packaging assistance for any shipper, but having been in logistics for a number of years, I can tell you few take advantage of it. UPS, Fedex, the USPS and all freight companies invariably look at the way items are packaged before paying any claims. In my experience, many shippers are clueless when it comes to proper protective packaging, or if they feel the cost is higher than absorbing damages, won't spend the extra money to package their merchandise properly.

Re:TSA

[neumayr]

Doube minimum wage. Are you implying that's good pay for a job that's bound to destroy your health?

Re:TSA

[bberens]

Right, so OP had crappy parents or something and therefore should take out his impotent rage on inanimate boxes he's being paid to take care of rather than showing a little initiative to improve his life and get out of the 4am shift. There's plenty of low-lifes who will work that 4am shift. Just a tiny bit of positive attitude and hard work will get you out of that place.

Re:TSA

[caerwyn]

That's not necessarily true. A good friend of mine worked in a management position for a few years after college, and one of the stops on his rotations through company departments was shipping. He was expected to be out with the employees he was managing at least part of the time, especially under exceptional circumstances. Just because a job requires a college degree and has excellent compensation (which his did) doesn't meant that it's not going to have its crap moments.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno about his company, but UPS has a turnover rate over 100%. That's right, they go through their entire staff more than once per year. Everyone does "fucking leave", and they get more people who also leave. Maybe if you want decent service, it's not going to be as cheap? Just throwing that out there.

Re:TSA

[morari]

The main point, however, was that no matter what job you accept, you should be honorable enough to do that job well, even when the conditions aren't to your liking.

You should do it just well enough not to get fired. This is the real world, after all. You're not going to see any additional compensation for being "honorable". In fact, hard workers are often times picked out of the pack and scrutinized. They make the lazy workers (ie: everyone else) look bad. It's much easier to get rid of one hard worker and maintain the status quo. At best, your hard work will just result in you picking up everyone else's slack... again, for no additional compensation.

Do what you're there to do. Never do anything more. Do less if you can.

Re:TSA

[smooth wombat]

They make the lazy workers (ie: everyone else) look bad. ... At best, your hard work will just result in you picking up everyone else's slack... again, for no additional compensation.

DING DING DING DING DING!!!!!! We have a winner!

I have told folks that companies don't want people who know what they're doing because if you really know what you're doing, you make the rest of the people around you look like neurotic baboons. This in turn drives down morale because you've set a high standard of work ethic which no one else wants to live up to.

As to picking up the slack of others, that's exactly what happened here at my work and I (finally) stopped doing the others work. Calls will sit in the queue until our supervisor assigns them to someone even though we're all supposed to watch the queue. I have other work that I do and my performance reviews are always exemplary, so I don't worry about being assigned a call once in a while.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

In a perfect world, a complaints department would rely on good tracking software to route problems the customers have directly into the lap of those who created them in the first place. Steve from the night shift dropped my fragile package? Right out of his paycheck it comes out, in monthly installments, with a little extra taken from his supervisor's paycheck as well. Oh, and Steve gets to apologize to me, over the phone. The other Steve can take some time to apologize for the lack of Flash support.

But no, in this world, I have to be given the run-around by a bunch of answering robots, so that the company that did wrong by me in the first place can rest assured that I am not wasting any more of its precious, precious time once I've forked over the cash.

Re:TSA

[FuckingNickName]

tl;dr Arbeit macht frei, right?

Re:TSA

[cusco]

You have the freedom to vote with your feet and move on.

You haven't been job hunting recently, have you?

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

I could care less how hard it is to give a flying fuck about every single fragile package. That's your damn job. Y'know, that thing you get paid for? Just do it properly or quit.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy, aren't you glad that pilots don't stop giving a flying fuck about your ass after 10 hours of flying? Or that the doctor doesn't stop giving a flying fuck about you after you've been bleeding for 10 minutes and (s)he's all messy? Or that after a long double-shift the guy building your car and assembling the brakes doesn't stop giving a fuck after a long 12 hour shift?

Fucking pussy. Suck it up. And stop breaking my expensive shit.

That is why the doctor and pilot get paid more. For example, a pilot is no different than a bus driver (no offense), but I for sure hope that when they check his/her references their former boss does not come back with "at the end of his shift, he stops giving a fuck".

Re:TSA

[Aquitaine]

a pilot is no different than a bus driver

Sure, a bus driver who will kill everyone on the bus if he goes below 55mph for most of the route. And who can drive without being able to see anything outside the bus.

Re:TSA

[Rich0]

Yup. Perhaps the shipping companies need to pay their employees more, or whatever.

I've seen lots of discussion elsewhere around "proper packaging." That seems like a bit of a cop-out when you consider their requirements for "proper packaging." Sure, there isn't much you can do to eliminate turbulence, so your package does need to handle a few Gs. However, it seems like the shipping industry is proposing that everybody spends an extra $75 on packaging so that they can save $5 in handling costs.

Re:TSA

[Vexor]

As a former UPS employee here's the inside deal. The working theory is if a box is marked fragile, it's packed in order to withstand the abuse of normal packages. Furthermore, unless you want your presents unwrapped for you, put those wrapped boxes within a slightly bigger box. Your boxes barely make it through in one piece, wrapping paper doesn't have a chance...

Re:TSA

[cayenne8]

"Doube minimum wage. Are you implying that's good pay for a job that's bound to destroy your health?"

Actually, I would guess that working like that (lifting, constantly moving) would provide you greater exercise that the usual US citizen and therefore would increase your health.

Re:TSA

[Reziac]

I'd be hard put to resist writing in reply, "My hobby is reading the bottom of shipping boxes."

Yeah, I'm easily amused too. :)

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

My brother in law has worked at UPS for 7 years.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't we nailed that lovely little statistic to nurture rather than nature yet?

Re:TSA

[ottothecow]

Not to mention that I expect the minimum wage burger flipper not to spit in my food and to be able to lift the 50lb box of fries down from the shelf (and I also expect them not to put a steel-toed boot through my patty or crush my bun with a heavy package)...

so why is it unreasonable to expect the double-minimum wage package lifter to be careful with my damn box?

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not your buddy, pal.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

well said. Looks like the carriage company's policy of employing the biggest pussy-bitches they can is the real problem.

Re:TSA

[mrchaotica]

Or they can be picky when they accept parcels marked fragile but with shitty packaging.

Being marked 'fragile' implies shitty packaging, because if it had sufficiently good packaging it wouldn't need to be marked fragile.

Re:TSA

[certron]

It took this long to be Godwin'd? I'm impressed!

Re:TSA

[mrchaotica]

...couldn't you request better work conditions? Glove, a jacket, portable heater? Divide that cost by the thousands of packages you handle per day and I don't think it would represent a price change.

You forgot to multiply by the thousands of workers requesting such changes.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Doctors and Pilots make a lot more. Mechanics will lose their job and it will be harder to get another mechanic job. What is the incentive for a UPS worker? You can't fire them until you prove they are reckless. Then they can just go out and get another job for the same pay.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, yes!! Of course. The packaging is meant only to support the "Fragile" and "This side up" labels: would the labels be able to float in the air close to the goods been shipped, no packaging would be necessary...

Stupid me; thanks in heaps for opening my eyes, I can now reduce the cost of posting my parcels as well as the time I spend wrapping everything up neatly.

Re:TSA

[ninja59]

Not exactly. I assume they already provide uniforms and all other effects (back braces, etc) for the workers. I guess I am trying to say that they should get the "right" things for the employees. The right things should only be a little more expensive than what they are using right now. But, responding directly to your comment: each employee must process X number of packages to be beneficial to the company. Multiply that number by the "useful life" of said equipment and divide by the price if the equipment. If you work from that concept, it does not matter how many employees you have. You just have to ask if that cost per package is worth it to have better service or be able to demand better work from your employees considering you are providing the needed equipment.

Re:TSA

[drcheap]

First off, that's a mightly claim to say that hard drives are the basis of our society.

I LOL'd. Then I read about your early morning RAID adventure and realized you are an undercover non-nerd hanging out at /. You don't put a bunch of disks from the same batch in the same array, that's asking for a multiple failure.

Hand in your card now, if you even have one.

Re:TSA

[CAIMLAS]

Who said anything about them being from the same batch? They were shipped together (two batches actually) but they had different batch serial numbers.

(Seriously, like that makes much difference. I've seen more correlation between who shipped the disks and the condition of the postage box than I have disk batching.)

Re:TSA

[Meski]

I currently work for a Canadian shipping company that handles UPS, Purolator, DHL and a bit of FedEx air freight across the country and I can tell you at 4 AM outside in the cold and rain after the 4000th 50lb supposedly fragile package it's REALLY hard to give a flying(get it? 'cause it's air freight) fuck about your shipment. And of course as they say in the article, express shipping (read: air freight) is expensive, to keep a reasonable profit margin sacrifices have to be made and so that although 1 in 1000 might get damaged the other 999 make it to their destination on time and in one piece.

In other words don't cry 'wolf' with the fragile stickers.

Re:TSA

[quadrox]

And what is so wrong with "Arbeit macht frei" other than that it was used in the 3rd Reich?

If you believe that "Arbeit macht frei" implies that you should be treated as a slave you couldn't be more wrong. It's more about the satisfaction of a job well done than having to work in perpetuality. If your'e spending your whole life procrastinating and not putting any energy into anything, then you're missing out.

Re:TSA

[quadrox]

Yes, and as long as something is not politically correct/doesn't suit your worldview there can't be any truth to it, it has to be wrong.

Re:TSA

[FuckingNickName]

There isn't any sound evidence for causation, only correlation. There can be truth to it, but there is no evidence of truth to it. Those such as yourself prejudiced by racism choose an unscientific explanation based on inferiority of race then challenge others to falsify your choice, ignoring the work of criminologists, psychologists and other professionals.

Similarly, it could be true that working a shitty job just means you're lazy, aka Victorian "the poor are just lazy", but nothing beyond uninformed bigotry supports that position. You ignore, for example, sociological or demographical studies of social mobility or psychologists' understanding of aspects of intelligence set at birth or in early youth.

Re:TSA

[FuckingNickName]

If you believe that "Arbeit macht frei" implies that you should be treated as a slave you couldn't be more wrong. It's more about the satisfaction of a job well done than having to work in perpetuality.

No, the cynical installation of the sign was derived from a very good understanding of where such philosophy leads, and you are playing the role of the Fool who takes the message at face value.

I'd perhaps expect an "OMG Godwin!", but the fact that you continue to advocate for the devil while he stares you in the face implies that you are either a troll or genuinely believe that scary nonsense you are spouting.

Re:TSA

[quadrox]

Maybe I am ignorant, but then please elaborate some more on what exactly you think is the problem and how it will lead where. I honestly don't follow you, so again, please elaborate.

Re:TSA

[quadrox]

I didn't mean to argue that that is how it works, it simply seemed to me that you wouldn't even consider the possibility. Sometimes people get blinded by political correctness and I assumed it to be the case here. My apologies.

If you have additional research to what I have seen so far, is there anything in particular you think I might benefit from reading?

Re:TSA

[smithmc]

My point: no matter the degree of the persons in charge of the freight, a way of motivating them to do a proper job is in the hands of the company - I fail to see how one can blame exclusively the handler and totally disregard the role of company.

That depends on whether the supply of package handlers exceeds the demand. If it does, then said package handler better figure out a way to get motivated, or find himself out of a job.

Re:TSA

[smithmc]

Boy, aren't you glad that pilots don't stop giving a flying fuck about your ass after 10 hours of flying? Or that the doctor doesn't stop giving a flying fuck about you after you've been bleeding for 10 minutes and (s)he's all messy? Or that after a long double-shift the guy building your car and assembling the brakes doesn't stop giving a fuck after a long 12 hour shift?

I sure am. That's one reason that airline pilots, doctors, and even auto assembly line workers all get paid a lot more than package handlers.

Re:TSA

[TheQuantumShift]

Pilots do sometimes stop giving a fuck, whip out their laptops and start "training". Down goes a plane. That's a big deal.

Sometimes doctors do quit caring and hand out misdiagnoses and leave sponges in people. Person dies. That's a big deal.

And the guy assembling the brakes is a robot, but sometimes the guy watching the robots misses something and a wire isn't connected. Car can't stop, people might die. That's a big deal.

However, loading trailers for UPS you're expected to move 400-800 packages an hour (400 load-800 unload as of 10 years ago, it's probably worse now) get paid minimum wage, never get enough hours a week to pay the bills so it's obviously your second job. And it's monotonous, hard labor. And sometimes, yes, someone's "expensive shit" gets dropped.

Not even remotely close to a big deal.

Re:TSA

[AudioEfex]

Thank God most of the vendors I used have stopped using DHL. I hate to complain to companies and only do so when absolutely necessary, but I've complained to several over DHL and eventually they stopped using them. Thankfully, I get at least 3-5 packages a week and haven't seen DHL in quite some time.

The worst experience was a TiVo I was waiting for "overnight" shipment from around 2005. Well, back then "overnight" meant 2-day to them. Okay, fine. Day two comes, no package. Day three, four...website shows it's sitting 90 miles away from my house. No update. I finally call on day five, they tell me they aren't sure where it is, and that "overnight is not guaranteed". Eventually, it showed up the beginning of the next week (about eight days late). Kicker was, it worked for about two weeks then went defective - though I can't blame it on the "week in limbo" cripes knows what it went through and I've always wondered if it had anything to do with it.

Then again, while USPS is often great (Priority Mail is awesome, I love the ease and knowing what the price will be ahead of time), it depends on your office. I live near two post offices, one is much closer and never has a line, but that one is also run by complete idiots and I've had numerous problems there. I just had plain bad luck with them for awhile, but I stopped going over a customer service issue when my 2-3 day Priority Package was bounced back and forth around the country for 12 days before it arrived (and kept coming back to that location, something was funny), and the "Postmaster" of that location refused to refund me. "I don't have the authority." Me: "Uh, you are the postmaster of this location, this location took my money..." wouldn't help at all. I go to the other one (not much further away, but more traffic to get there and always busy) and I never have a problem.

I don't get a lot of big freight/packages (I would never buy something like a TV online, I want to pick it up in a store) so maybe that's why I'm so happy that most of my stuff comes UPS. Always comes on time, or sooner, and never had an issue due to their handling. Though I also think that has to do with the fact the majority of my shipments come from Amazon, who packs most things pretty darn well.

Re:TSA

[mrbcs]

I LOL'd. Then I read about your early morning RAID adventure and realized you are an undercover non-nerd hanging out at /. You don't put a bunch of disks from the same batch in the same array, that's asking for a multiple failure.

Owned. ;-) Awesome, thanks for the chuckle!

Other study: Which is the worst?

[Anonymous Coward]

American Airlines is the worst company in regards to shipping my package. My package got manhandled last time I used their service. Would not use again. F-------

Re:Other study: Which is the worst?

[masmullin]

I wouldn't mind my package being ladyhandled, but yeah, manhandling is not desired.

Not that there is anything wrong with dudes who like to be manhandled.

Re:Other study: Which is the worst?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, a hand is a hand. Who cares, as long as you get the happy ending. That's why I'm pissed at the TSA. They have yet to give me a happy ending. Squeezing one off in the aircraft bathroom isn't as much fun. Think about that next time you see a bit of "hand lotion" on a plane.

   

Re:Other study: Which is the worst?

[AaronW]

I recently shipped a couple of packages when I traveled American Airlines and all of my TSA locks were totally bent or downright broken even though the TSA never opened anything. Then again, TSA locks are utter crap. Fortunately the contents were not really fragile and came through intact.

It's never the speed that gets you

[BadAnalogyGuy]

When you're in a car crash, the problem isn't the rate of speed that gets you. It's the rapid deceleration.

What this says to me is that if you need to carry something fragile and important, you should fly to the destination yourself and hand carry the parcel.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[TBBle]

Back when intercontinental leased lines were all the rage, it was the case that a nightly financial data transfer from (I believe) a stock exchange trading floor was cheaper and faster done by loading the data onto tape and flying someone by Concorde from the UK to the US, than to transmit the data over the network.

That's both anecdotal and marred by my own recollection of the story, but it supports the "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of backup tapes on the highway" saying.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, it is the deceleration. But compare a car hitting a brick wall at 100kph vs 10kph. The faster the car is going, the more it decelerates in an accident. So saying it is the deceleration and not the speed is just silly.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[rthille]

Depends on how the brick wall is constructed. If the car is going 62 mph, it might just go right thru the brick wall and not decelerate again.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[hedwards]

As long as you don't need low latency the sneakernet has and probably for the foreseeable future will beat the snot out of wires in terms of bandwidth. Even by train it takes me 2 days to get say halfway across the country. For approximately 1880 miles or so. 6Tb over 2 days would be round about 38gbps, if I got the figures correct. That would be like 3 2Tb drives, and not even going as quickly as one could got. Driving makes it even faster, and if you're in for a plane ride it gets pretty ridiculously fast.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[masmullin]

I'm always hand carrying my parcel. It sometimes gets me in trouble.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[Anonymous Coward]

I flew the concorde to England a few times in the 90s. I really miss it.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[CohibaVancouver]

What this says to me is that if you need to carry something fragile and important, you should fly to the destination yourself and hand carry the parcel.

...and there are also companies that do just this:

http:http://wikitravel.org/en/Air_courier

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[LeoZ]

36 megabytes per second, not 38 gbs.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[HeronBlademaster]

38MB/s is still a lot faster than most fiber-to-the-home installations, to say nothing of Comcast's standard offering...

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[Surt]

Were you intentionally being funny about the rate of speed and the deceleration not being the same thing? If so, kudos.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[Anonymous Coward]

It's .5555Gbps for 6 TB over 2 days. Of course, a car full of drives (placed at 2000 drives to be safe on weight) would be 370Gbps. 740 if you can get there in one day. Drives in a car will be faster than even disk write speeds, from now until the end of media limited by the speed of light.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[c0lo]

Were you intentionally being funny about the rate of speed and the deceleration not being the same thing? If so, kudos.

Funny as it would this pseudo-redundant (leading to a contradiction) form, I'm not quite convinced that what kills you is exclusively the force (proportional with deceleration) or the shock (acceleration/deceleration rate) has also something to do with it.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[martas]

media limited by the speed of light.

not sure i get what the speed of light has to do with anything. when transmitting, the speed of light limits only the latency, not bandwidth.

there's another limit that's much more important - the Bekenstein bound, which places a limit on the density of storage devices. And, now that I think about it, it places a limit on the bandwidth of a link too - if you think of a link as a cylinder (crude approximation), it has limited volume, and hence can contain a limited amount of information. Combined with the speed of light, you get a limit on the bandwidth of the link...

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[dtmos]

I flew the concorde to England a few times in the 90s. I really miss it.

This. I fear we'll not see its like again in my lifetime.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when intercontinental leased lines were all the rage, it was the case that a nightly financial data transfer from (I believe) a stock exchange trading floor was cheaper and faster done by loading the data onto tape and flying someone by Concorde from the UK to the US, than to transmit the data over the network.

That's both anecdotal and marred by my own recollection of the story, but it supports the "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of backup tapes on the highway" saying.

For the Terabytes of VLBI data, flying someone with the disks as luggage is often cheaper than parcel delivery.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true and happened a lot with data and documents. BA used to give people near free fight tickets to courier them. You'd collect a tape or package at their desk and hand it in at their desk at the other end. Flights across the Atlantic were around $45. Alas, they stopped the practice about 4 years ago.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[Anonymous Coward]

6Tb over 2 days would be round about 38gbps, if I got the figures correct

You didn't. It's 36 Mbps (you're off by a factor of about 1024).

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[Anonymous Coward]

You did not get it right. It is around 277mbps, but the point probably still stands regardless.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[Surt]

acceleration/deceleration rate is traditionally jerk, not shock.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[Rich0]

Yeah, looking at the page you linked to, I'm not too worried about storage densities hitting those limits anytime soon. Bekenstein's bound translates into something like 10^38 bits in a 1 gram container 1cm in radius. Maybe in a century of exponential storage growth we might start hitting those kinds of limits, but if we actually work out the laws of physics to a level such that we can store data at that density we'll probably have unlocked most of the secrets of the universe by then anyway...

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[martas]

You can't know that. All that data could be just colcats and porn.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[neosaurus]

That's both anecdotal and marred by my own recollection of the story, but it supports the "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of backup tapes on the highway" saying.

A variation of the example and the above quote are from Andrew Tanenbaum's book on Computer Networks.

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering it spewed greenhouse gasses to the order of 20 times normal jets, sorry to all you elitist bastards who think paying a little more entitles you to do whatever you want. Enjoy your California Condor egg omelets!

Re:It's never the speed that gets you

[TBBle]

A variation of the example and the above quote are from Andrew Tanenbaum's book on Computer Networks.

Which I have indeed read, and so it's probably my source. Certainly the quote's source, less certainly the example.

When I worked for UPS

[__aahmnf219]

I recommended people mark their packages with something like "Danger- Live Fish"...

Re:When I worked for UPS

[LynnwoodRooster]

Would labeling it "bottle deer urine" work as well, too?

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't flip it over! Those fish are vola.... BOOOOOM!"

Re:When I worked for UPS

[MichaelKristopeit206]

i knew a lot of people that worked for UPS loading trucks... they said if you sent a long cardboard tube it was pretty much guaranteed to be used as a hockey stick or baseball bat on other small packages.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Ethanol-fueled]

A popular suggestion for mailing packages to Nicaragua or Bolivia(or pretty much any dirt-poor country) is to do the opposite and label the package ropa usada (used clothing) to discourage the handlers from stealing it.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[schklerg]

I worked for the aforementioned shipping company. I unloaded trucks. Here I learned that Fragile is a French word, meaning, "to drop kick". Also, the phrase, "UPS, where the Q Stands for Quality". There's no Q in UPS you say??? EXACTLY! Of course I still use them...

Re:When I worked for UPS

[schklerg]

I felt a bit guilty after the last post. I did work for UPS, and I did learn those phrases. And while I saw my fair share of kicked in, mangled, or shredded packages (some of them at my hand), I never saw it done deliberately. You have a lot of work to do in a short time and things get treated rough. Things that say "this side up" or "fragile" just get handled more as a result of the instructions and thus they will be more prone to error on statistics alone. If you care about your stuff, pack it well and then the company doesn't really matter.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[1310nm]

These test results are quite surprising to me, as the packages I receive from UPS are typically battered and have damaged corners, whereas those from FedEx are typically well-treated. I even had UPS call me once to tell me that a package, which I had taken care to tape really well, had come open during shipment, and was apparently in such a state of acceleration that the contents were strewn about, so they wanted to ask me what was in the box.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[director_mr]

i knew a lot of people that worked for UPS loading trucks... they said if you sent a long cardboard tube it was pretty much guaranteed to be used as a hockey stick or baseball bat on other small packages.

I worked at UPS, and had several friends that worked there as well. Either you are trolling slashdot and making stories up, or your friends were spinning quite the story. You are dealing with such a high volume of packages, you don't have time to play around with individual packages for your own amusement at UPS. Additionally, they grade your performance based on the volume of packages you handle, and the percentage of them that are mishandled (damaged, lost, sent to the wrong area). Anyone who would play around and intentionally damage packages wouldn't last long. I suspect the same would be true of any package delivery company, really.

It interesting what slashdot chooses to reward the informative score to.

That being said, long cardboard tube do seem to be damaged more often than normal boxes. This is because they are typically weaker than the average cardboard box, very often they are not filled to capacity, giving them no internal structure to resist crushing forces, and the conveyers and rollers don't handle them as well as a normal box, because of their narrow shape and ability to roll around. Also they are an odd shape, so if a load shifts in a trailer, they can be exposed to some shearing forces because of they are usually longer than the average box.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[hedwards]

That's much more consistent with what I've seen. I've never worked for UPS, but I did run the loading dock at a high rise. UPS seemed to be much more professional in terms of the way they conducted things and in my experience I've rarely had any trouble with them manhandling my packages.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

So why do I always see the UPS guy shooting the shit at our loading dock.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Drishmung]

You do know you can mail live bees?

When I worked for the Post Office, I came to the conclusion that the only way to send fragile stuff any distance was to hand carry it, or make it relatively indestructible.

Point in case: overseas surface mail. A fragile package (marked as such) would be carefully placed, right side up, in a mail bag, under the watchful eye of a supervisor. After which (there being no 'fragile' overseas surface mail service), the rest of the packages would be thrown in on top of it from up to 20ft away. The full mail bag would then be consigned to cold, unfeeling machinery which would transport it around the building, ending with a 10ft drop into a chute leading to the loading bay. There, strong men---no doubt caring, thoughtful and gentle as kittens given the opportunity---would toss the bags as far as they could into the back of a truck, whence it was delivered to the docks and thence to a ship, where it got a special low rate because it was used as packing to stop the rest of the cargo from shifting in high seas.

The point is that very soon in its journey, any possible 'FRAGILE' label is useless, as the package has been aggregated into a larger more economic mass, and that aggregate gets treated pretty much just like any other piece of cargo.

The only solutions are

• Encase it in Carbonite
• Hand carry it

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

Presumably because he had a bad burrito the night before.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[EdIII]

Well..... I will believe the troll first based on my experience. If you want +informative....

Back when hard drives used to be HUGE (I mean really big) we built a 10k engineering workstation. The case was made out of solid fucking steel. Solid. Steel. Why? Because we had two of those monster hard drives mounted inside it. We needed to move this thing around the country so we had a specially built container, but this was shipped from the company that built it for us... and they used UPS. When we received it, the power supply was obliterated. The first hard drive had an end crushed so bad you could see the platters. The steel frame was warped to the point it sheared off the screws holding the hard drives in it. Both hard drives fell through to the bottom taking out all the cards and cracking the motherboard in half.

UPS response? "Well you obviously dropped it". Really? Reaalllly? From what, a fucking 15 story building? The company that built it had it insured and had to build us another one, but we heard it took a year and a bunch of lawyers for UPS to finally cough up the money. Seriously, anyone with half a brain would have looked at that system and realized it was not due to it falling, but being crushed by a rather large object like a UPS truck running over it.

How about a second one....

Company purchased a Persian rug for the front of the office (insured of course) and we received it with two holes straight through the rug that exactly match one of those little loading trucks.

UPS response? "You must have purchased it like that".

So after using the lawyerpult a 2nd time it was decided that company wide down to the smallest detail, UPS was banned from use for any reason. We informed all of our vendors, and to this day anyone involved with that company still remembers the horror stories and does their best to dissuade others from using UPS as well.

Not mentioning the delayed and missing packages....

Since then, I have worked with many companies and clients and have received and opened a large number of UPS packages. I would have to put the damage rate around 30%. Superficially, on the box that is. I am talking large punctures and crushed corners. Only a lot of peanuts and careful packaging keep the claims rolling in against UPS. I also honestly forget how many networking products I have pulled out of UPS boxes that were also partially crushed but the product was still intact due to its internal packaging. Let's just put it at "often".

So yeah.... I don't believe the people making those posts that make UPS look like incompetent psychopathic jackasses are trolling. From my experience, and the horror stories of other people, it seems like UPS hires sadists that actively try to one up each other.

Of course what about Fedex?

More Expensive. 2 lost packages in nearly 20 years. No damages. A few delays.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[MichaelKristopeit201]

is it quicker to walk to the end of the truck with a baseball sized package or to toss it in the air and hit a line drive with a cardboard tube bat to a waiting coworker?

Re:When I worked for UPS

[mysidia]

You do know you can mail live bees?

Perfect... Warning: Fragile: Contains Live Bees.

Make sure your package contains some visible holes on the exterior, such as handle holes on the carton, air vents.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work at a film processing store. We often had cameras and films come in damaged, but twice in a fortnight we had bags come in from a smaller town, packed with a hundred or so films. These bags had been run over by a forklift. Film and cameras all ruined by the courier company, who responded with "Oh. We're sorry. Our insurance will cover it."

Re:When I worked for UPS

[davek]

you believe "slashdot" has the ability to "reward"? what would make you think that or care if you weren't a marketeer attempting to sway public opinion?

MOD PARENT UP

Re:When I worked for UPS

[luther349]

don't forget playing hockey with them. mark funny if you wish but i know someone that worked for ups and told me stories of that,

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, I wonder who the real troll, "MichaelKristopeit" is...

In this thread alone I see posts by:

"MichaelKristopeit206"
"MichaelKristopeit178"
"MichaelKristopeit207"
"MichaelKristopeit118"
"Mikey Kristopeity"

A troll with several accounts, nice! Now we can really have fun with him!

Re:When I worked for UPS

[arb phd slp]

My brother kept bees in high school and he did purchase bees in this way. The packages tend to hum audibly. The carriers actually do handle those boxes rather gingerly.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT UP

You realize he's a troll right? Take a real good look at his posting name; he has different numbers after the end of his name indicating he has multiple accounts to troll with.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[bertoelcon]

Would labeling it "bottle deer urine" work as well, too?

Not according to my experience unpacking various urines at a hunting store.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Lehk228]

my experience has been the same, UPS will destroy or misdeliver at random, so i use them for things worth under $100 if they are the cheapest option and as long as getting the shipment there successfully in a timely manner does not matter

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Drishmung]

You can also send scorpions... although the conditions are a little more restrictive

http://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_007.htm

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Mr. Slippery]

Concur. UPS == the suck, and I will not use them if there are other practical alternatives. For small packages, USPS Priority Mail is the way to go.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[CrazyJim1]

Yah I worked for UPS too when I was commuting 45 minutes each way to Carnegie Mellon. I respected people's packages there as do most. No one wants to lose their job. And you'd lose your job the instant anyone sees you seriously mishandling a package. The worst I ever did at UPS was not check mistakes so sometimes I sent the wrong package to a different hub down the road.

I do like your notion of why long cylindrical objects get hurt. It makes perfect sense that it has more angles of attack and its also like a lever in itself so it can exert extra pressure on itself if packed incorrectly.

In a down economy, if you can't get a job, there's no shame in doing some UPS for a while. The way I always looked at it was,"4 hours a night where I get paid to be at a gym." It isn't that bad of a deal for some. The only problem is if you start doing the math of how many years you need to work there before you pay off your student loans, then you can become defeatist easily.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[nospam007]

Labeling? Put an additional, unsecured, fragile bottle of Cadaverine in your package, that way if they aren't careful, they'll know immediately.
They'll know for a looooong time.

PS. Additionally, you won't have to open the package to see damage, you'll know as soon as the truck door opens in front of your building.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite tracking log entry:
Delayed- train derailment.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[AmberBlackCat]

While we were at the UPS facility hoping to get employed, we watched one of the employees loading a truck. He was trying to fit a package on the shelf of the truck. He repeatedly threw the package toward the shelf and it repeatedly hit the shelf and bounced back until he finally got it to stay up there. So my observation matches the claims that they don't handle packages well. Also, I don't recall ever receiving a CD from Amazon.com without a cracked case. All of them are shipped via UPS.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[WuphonsReach]

It will depend entirely on the area from which the local hub/center can pull its workforce. If it's a decent town with hard working folks, your workers tend to be decent folks.

Local standards can also vary depending on "how far the nearest authority is". If the district or divisional manager never visits except once a month or once a quarter, things can get *very* lax. On the flip side, sometimes the larger hubs can have more problems because it's easier to hide misconduct in the chaos.

UPS pay is quite decent. The main problem is that you will spend *years* as a part-time employee while you wait for your seniority to build and for a full-time job to open up. And when it does open-up, top-seniority employees get first choice. Remember, it's a union shop, with all sorts of fun union rules. Which also means that you can get stuck paying for a non-performing worker if the shop steward protects them from being disciplined.

But before you cry a river for UPS, that it has to put up with union workers... UPS management deserves every bit of grief given to them by the union.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Cosgrach]

When I worked as a courier, anything marked fragile was fair game. My buddy who worked at the USPS said pretty much the same. There is no substitute for proper packing.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[ep32g79]

go spin your lies to someone else. a cylinder is more sturdy than a box... simple physics, moron. thanks for confirming the frequency of tube damage.

Yes, but a cylinder also has the property of being able to roll with ease. When a package rolls, it inevitably finds itself lodged under other cylinders called tires. The crush weight of whatever may roll over your tube will be considerably larger than what it is rated at. Something like this box will ship better than any cylinder and something like this will fare even better.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

Insurance for UPS or FedEx is a huge waste of money--I'm not surprised that it took lawyers to get them to pay. I once had a camera shipped to me, signature required. When I checked the tracking and saw that it had been delivered, I went over to the mail room to grab it (the mail room clerk can sign for it) and found that my camera was not in fact there.

Upon checking the signature verification online, the box was just blank. I contacted FedEx, and they first swore that it had been delivered but couldn't produce any signature, then asked me to prove that there was actually a camera in the box, asked me to bring the camera that I never received for them to evaluate, then eventually just stopped responding altogether. I'd given up on my expensive piece of equipment and bought a replacement when eight months later the package arrives in the mail room.

They had delivered it to the office 10 blocks away. The address on the box was correctly 2400, but they delivered it to 3400, not gotten a signature for it, and then it took the people at that office 8 months to realize that the orphaned package in their mail room was actually labeled for the building 10 blocks down. Meanwhile, I'd already purchased an expensive replacement camera and vowed never to pay for shipping "insurance" again.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[EvilIdler]

UPS hasn't caused quite the horror stories mentioned by others for me, but they frequently fail to find my door and leave a card (at the door or in the mailbox).

USPS have been really quick at delivering stuff when I order from the US - and I'm in Europe. Still amazed at the 3.5 days total shipping time for one order, and about 6 days is the average. The postal service is nowhere near as bad as the stereotype says!

Re:When I worked for UPS

[shikaisi]

It always worried me that the name of the company was pronounced "Oops!" That's kind of a giveaway, isn't it?

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

Liar, stop impersonating Mikey Kristopeity. It is transparent that you are a troll out to soil his good name.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[nedlohs]

A cylinder will be used as a bat more often, since it will it's ability to roll will cause it to get stuck or fall off things more often. Which then requires a person to pick it up providing an opportunity for bat like usage.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

that gives me an idea...
you can send live bees?

Encase it with live bees. I mean, box-in-box, the internal cargo box suspended on springs / strong rubber bands, the space between boxes filled with live bees, the external box more fragile than the internal one. Give it obnoxiously big, unique warning labels on the outside.

Before sending the cargo proper send about 5 dummies, bees only.

They WILL learn to handle it in a way that does not lead to outer box getting punctured.

captcha: mortally

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Neil Boekend]

On Mythbusters (S01E16 if I'm correct) they had these glass vials of artificial skunk smell. Use them as shock watches and let the person who drops the package throw up. The smell dissipates within minutes (one of the problems Adam and Jamie had) so his colleagues after him should not have much of a problem.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have strong feelings on UPS, FedEx, or any other courier, but I always wondered why people chose them over USPS. Priority mail is fast, cheap, and I have never seen evidence of mis-handling. Oh, and you don't have to take a day off work waiting at home for your package to show up (though you might have to retrieve it from the post office if you are not home).

Re:When I worked for UPS

[geoskd]

Company purchased a Persian rug for the front of the office (insured of course) and we received it with two holes straight through the rug that exactly match one of those little loading trucks.

I find it interesting that you claim UPS was the carrier because there are several glaring problems with your Story:

First, UPS did not handle packages above 120Lbs back when drives and drive assemblies were the size and weight you refer to. Crated materials were explicitly excluded until recently. That means that your drive assembly was handled by another carrier, most likely a freight forwarding company, but not UPS (UPS bought Overnight about 5 years ago, and that was their first real foray into freight).

Second, In all of the UPS facilities that I have ever been in, UPS does not use Fork trucks for moving any packages. They only use those for equipment maintenance, if they even have one at that particular facility. Freight forwarding companies use them extensively for moving pallet loads around. A Persian rug big enough for an office setting would also exceed UPS size restrictions, so again, it looks like your claim is either against another carrier, or in the case of the rug, possibly the shipper.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[glatiak]

UPS is on the top of my shitlist for willfully damaging packages and lying to the customer and shipper and assessing steep and imaginary fees to up their revenue. But DHL is pretty good at that as well. I had to ship a camera part back to its manufacturer in China for service. The paperwork was correct but DHL would not release the package without a $100 'duty' which they insisted could be refunded from the government -- but the government says it was the shipper. Yeah, right. So DHL gets it for general larceny -- but UPS for scope. I have received books that had been left in water so long the pages were disintegrating, a robot lawnmower that was dropped or slammed so the internal fibreglass parts were shattered (including the circuitboards) and countless packages that vanished because UPS didn't feel like going to my area -- so left them at the depot marked 'held at depot at recipients request'. Oh, they were found eventually by repeated calls to UPS and badgering them to do a trace -- then a 1 hour drive to their closest 'depot' between the hours of 4pm and 7pm M-Fri.. From the number of companies that use them as the exclusive carrier, I guess their salesforce is pretty pursuasive, sure ain't based on their quality or reliability.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[geminidomino]

Slight flaw:

How does my girlfriend then retrieve her birthday present from the inner box?

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Muad'Dave]

The USPS will ship live day-old chicks. They absorb the last of the yolk before hatching which gives them enough water and nourishment for the trip.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[X0563511]

Sounds like a driver had an oopsie.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

So ThinkGeek needs to sell us a gadget for inserting into packages that makes them sound like shipments of bees.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[dwinks616]

Very carefully? Also, this will make for a hell of a "surprise", especially if she's allergic to bees!

Re:When I worked for UPS

[BetterSense]

I'm a beekeeper. Bees come in the mail by the pound, packaged in small wooden crates. Imagine a wood crate about the size of a shoebox. On two opposite faces of the box, the sides are not wood, but instead are stapled-on window screen, with no reinforcing ribs or anything. So you can see straight through the box and see all the bees crawling around in there. You can also see their little legs sticking through the screen when they walk around. If you pick it up with your hand touching either of the sides that are screen, you can definitely feel the little bee-legs caressing your hand. The whole thing hums angrily when you shake it or set it down too hard. It goes right through the good ole' USPS that way. The hilarity of it never gets old to me.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed on this being total BS.

I work for a company that manufacturers fishing rods and we ship/receive hundreds of these packages (long boxes/tubes) a day. It's rare that we receive damaged packages (regardless of carrier). If we do, it's often due to poor packaging on incoming shipments.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Vexor]

When I worked at UPS we regularly had "bull sperm" shipped through. Came in a phallic shaped 5 gallon drum too.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

A proof that reality is often more fantastic than fiction.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[MichaelKristopeit208]

it is only apparent that you have claimed to be exactly what you are: NOTHING.

why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[MichaelKristopeit205]

every package must be picked up before it is put away...

from what i was told, almost everyone is familiar with playing "hockey" at work, where packages were slid across the ground after being struck with any long and firm tube, or triangle or long skinny rectangle package.

nubs or flat end caps could easily be added to cylinders to counter any rolling effect. are you claiming that UPS never thought about round packages while designing their distribution systems?

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Reziac]

So... the obvious solution to destructo-shipper?

Include a few live bees in every package.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[EdIII]

Well... I know I am not lying, which is what you see to be accusing me of.

The computer is without question. I was physically there during delivery. It was a UPS truck, a UPS driver, etc. Pretty easy to conclude from the big UPS letters on the side of the truck. I never said the computer was over 120 lbs either. You assumed that. These drives were big, 5.25", long, and took up two bays each, but that does not get the computer to 120 lbs. I am a big guy and I was the one who lifted it to the table, but I can tell you it was not 120 lbs.

As for the Persian rug, those holes were unmistakable. It was a loading truck. I did not physically see delivery in that case, but the company sued UPS directly. So maybe you are correct in that instance, but I was told it was UPS and I am absolutely certain that was where we aimed the lawyers.

For the last 20 some odd years those two particular instances have been why I refuse to use UPS under any circumstances. Not because of the damage, but because of how they refused to accept responsibility.

At best, your half right. The computer was all I ever needed as a justification though.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple: kill the bees before opening the box.

Freezing the box would be one option, but my favorite is gasoline fumes... put the package above an open can with a small amount of gasoline in it and they will die rather quickly.

What? Did you expect that shipping anything less than a full colony in the box would result in viable, happy bees? You can't just release a few dozen worker bees into the wild thousands of miles from their hive and just expect them to go off and live happily ever after. Wasps, perhaps, but I would still advocate killing them due to my arbitrary ethical standard of not feeling sympathy for the plight of any invertebrate.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[vlueboy]

Wow, you weren't kidding.
That and finding out here that you can also mail scorpions and day-old chicks is priceless.

Just when I thought humanity was cruel enough to animals, someone comes and shows me door #2 ;-)

Re:When I worked for UPS

[StikyPad]

Now that I know that, I almost want to order some. I can see it now...

"Honey, why did you order 5 baby chicks?"

"Because I could."

"But what are we going to do with them?"

"I haven't thought that far ahead..."

Re:When I worked for UPS

[charlesj68]

How does my girlfriend then retrieve her birthday present from the inner box?

Well, if it is too heavy and not restrained then retrieval of the inner box should not be a problem. She might have to scrape bee goo off its sides, however.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[PRMan]

I used to work from home and I happened to be in the living room going back up to the office when I heard a truck. I was expecting a UPS package so I looked out the window. The truck stopped for about 3 seconds without anybody getting out and then hightailed it toward the cul-de-sac. I ran out and stood in the middle of the street and the truck almost hit me. That's what it takes to get your package sometimes.

Another time I had a package sent back to the manufacturer without any notification whatsoever. I went to the local UPS office to complain and there were 3 cards filled out by the driver in my file. We never got our copy of them.

They've improved lately (after 1 year personal bans).

Re:When I worked for UPS

[nedlohs]

Seriously you don't understand the idea of a package being picked up more often than average?

I don't give a shit about UPS did or did not think about. But no I wouldn't expect them to do anything to a package other than slap a sticker on it.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[MichaelKristopeit212]

yes, i do understand it... that is why i'm claiming that some packages are picked up more than others... such as long and slim packages that can be used similar to hockey stocks to propel smaller packages along the floor.

i don't get a shit about you.

you're an idiot.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[nedlohs]

So you're an idiot then?

If long slim round packages fall more often they are going to be picked up more often than long slim non-round packages. Even though both are picked up more often than non-long slim packages.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[MichaelKristopeit212]

no, i'm michael kristopeit... i'm claiming you are an idiot... that is what "you're an idiot" means... of course that also means you wouldn't be able to understand this description, either... sadly you'll probably never understand your idiocy, moron.

they are ALSO going to be picked up REGARDLESS IF THEY FALL for use as hockey sticks and bats.

you're an idiot.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Meski]

That must look good on your resume. Urine unpacker.

Sorry, just taking the piss.

Re:When I worked for UPS

[MichaelKristopeit201]

why would something marked "fragile" be handled more? why would it be handled in a way that could even POTENTIALLY cause harm?

obviously lies from a marketeer = informative.

slashdot = stagnated

Re:When I worked for UPS

[Have Brain Will Rent]

My experiences with UPS were all frustrating and eventually I decided that if UPS were the only way I could get something then I wouldn't get it. I've used Fedex ground and air a fair bit and never had a problem with either of them except for packages coming from the US to Canada where they pulled this: the package arrives, all cleared through customs (because they never asked if you wanted them to broker it for you) then 5 weeks(!) after the delivery comes a bill for brokerage - about $60 on a $110 item. As long as you have the sender mark it clearly that you want to self-broker it isn't a problem and other than that I've been happy with their services.

Interesting but...

[Again]

The test is interesting but in my opinion the data set is too small to draw any real conclusions. It would be nice to see this test done at least a few times per mail carrier.

Re:Interesting but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just going to post the same thing. Even the best carrier occasionally breaks something. Send 20 boxes through and then we'll talk.

Re:Interesting but...

[RJFerret]

I can tell you a couple decades ago, in the 80s, before paintball became a common activity, a local paintball store had their deliveries shipped marked both "fragile" and unmarked--they quickly learned to not mark anything fragile to reduce breakage/costs.

It's like a heading "DON'T READ THIS". Nothing will draw attention to it more.

If you don't want to get "special" treatment, don't draw attention to yourself, as any vulnerable prey will attest.

Re:Interesting but...

[CheshireCatCO]

Agreed! And the report is woefully incomplete. You never report means without some sort of estimate of the standard deviation/standard error associated with the measurement. I can't tell if the difference in the average number of spikes is meaningful or not without knowing how tightly the results were clustered.

(My guess is "not very tightly," given that it sounds like the highest and lowest numbers of spikes (average) were the same planes, basically. That suggests that their method is flawed or that the results are that the means are basically the same to within any useful sense.)

Re:Interesting but...

[hedwards]

I'm pretty sure that a chesty woman with any sort of writing on here shirt will get attention much more quickly. I've always sort of wondered on what basis they get upset for people looking. If you don't want to get looked at putting writing on the shirt is probably not the wisest approach.

Re:Interesting but...

[IronSight]

Probably too late now, now they will probably treat every package from this guy like a newborn baby. I don't have a problem with any shipping company personally except for UPS' residential delivery boys not even knocking on my door before they leave my 700 dollar laptops on my doorstep in the rain, in a neighborhood of people that would gladly steal it. I work 3rds so when I check and see my package is out for delivery, I wait next to the door for the package, but they just ninja up, drop it at my door and walk off. WTF UPS. But I don't blame UPS though, it's probably not in their company policy to be morons, just some local bad eggs. I mean, I get laziness problems of delivery boys of the newspaper (drive up on the sidewalk, throw the paper in a puddle without a bag), bread company (guy drives up, waits for me to leave my desk for 2 seconds, then runs up, drops the bread racks at the door and runs away) because he doesn't feel he has to deliver only 2 racks of bread to a company, that our cooks need to drive out to the thrift shop every morning to save him 5 minutes), the local fast food places (don't feel like actually giving you what you ordered... ever). Everyone just thinks they don't get paid enough money to actually do their jobs anymore. Now since I have worked as a shipper in the past, shipping everything from car stereos to commercial stoves, I can tell you that good packaging will save you a headache. If it's an item you don't want to break, use a new or at least solid clean 200lb crush test box. Shake the box, if it doesn't move, it should be good. Packing goes on all sides of the object. It should be as a coffin, completely surrounded in hard foam. Bubble wrap is useless for most things large (over a foot in any direction). Peanuts give and sway causing your item to end up next to the cardboard at some point making it useless. If you bought it in a box on the shelf at the store, put it in another box. Those boxes aren't used to ship, they come in a case like that attached to a skid that is handled carefully with a forklift. They aren't meant for shipping in the mass mess (compared to a neat skid) that is a ups truck.

Re:Interesting but...

[Bigjeff5]

You must have missed the part at the very beginning of the article where they stated they did not have the time or the budget to get results that are anywhere statistically significant.

What moron gives a standard deviation/standard error when they know their sample size is too small to be statistically significant anyway?

This was just an "I wonder" kind of test. They get some surprising results, but you cannot draw any conclusions from them. You can't even say whether UPS, FedEx, or USPS handle packages the most gently. There isn't enough information, and they admit that right up front if you were to, you know, read it.

Re:Interesting but...

[TheScreenIsnt]

the data set is too small to draw any real conclusions

There are *so* many examples like this where there is a sound investigative idea and not a shred of methodological rigor.
Just a refresher for many of you:
1. Choose your outcome
2. Choose a threshold that will count as an important effect size
3. Power your study (choose how many units will be tested) based on #2
4. Document 1 - 3 before you do the study so we know you didn't go fishing for spurious correlations after the fact
5. Run the study
6. Inferential statistics!
7. Profit! Except, not really.

Those who think #6 is more about obscuring things than revealing them don't know much about #6.

Re:Interesting but...

[iinlane]

12 times out of 12 is enough data to confirm the handling is bad. You need more data only if you want to know just how bad is it.

Re:Interesting but...

[Surt]

Of course they want to be looked at, just not by you, perv.

It's a case of poor target discrimination.

Re:Interesting but...

[Surt]

Oops, intended to reply to the post above:
by hedwards (940851) writes: Foe of a Friend on Sun Nov 28, '10 07:01 PM (#34370814)
I'm pretty sure that a chesty woman with any sort of writing on here shirt will get attention much more quickly. I've always sort of wondered on what basis they get upset for people looking. If you don't want to get looked at putting writing on the shirt is probably not the wisest approach.

Re:Interesting but...

[RaymondKurzweil]

They get some surprising results, but you cannot draw any conclusions from them.

How do you conclude a result is "surprising" if you can't draw any conclusions from said results?

Re:Interesting but...

[JWSmythe]

It wasn't just too small to draw any real conclusions, it's too small to amount to anything other than a few writeups for misbehaving staff. That is, if they had provided the tracking numbers and times of the incidents. Without that information, all we know is that somewhere along the line, things didn't go as well as they should have.

    The data set should have been thousands. They should have been shipped in such a way that they were delivered through various facilities. Some facilities do badly. Even with that data, I cannot say if one company is better than another. We shipped through a few common routes.

    Those incidents cannot be considered indicative of how the entire company operates.

    I've shipped probably thousands of items over the years. Most came through with no problem. A few were packing mistakes and rough handling. A very few were due to mishandling that was beyond my responsibility (i.e., packed well, but still damaged).

    One local UPS facility, I never received a package that wasn't damaged on the outside. One FedEx location had a terrible habit of claiming to have attempted delivery without ever trying. Once, the building was closed for some reason, I parked my car at the entrance that the FedEx driver used. I waited, checking the tracking status frequently. About an hour after I expected it, I watched the driver fly by, not even slowing down, even though I was waving at him to stop. I needed that shipment that day. I called and complained. Then I found out the depot it would be arriving at, drove over there, and waited for it. According to him, the marked hours on the door indicated we were closed. We didn't have any hours marked at the door. The manager apologized profusely, but that didn't change the fact that I needed the package to do a server upgrade, and that cut into my maintenance window. I did get the job done on time, but I was lucky there were no problems.

    One was a brand new 1u server, being shipped from our office, to a remote datacenter. I packed it in the OEM box, which was great. I personally handed it off to the shipping company. It was shipped to be delivered in 5 days. I flew up the next day. When it arrived, it had clearly been skewered by a forklift (I've driven forklifts in a past life). My package was probably at the bottom of the pallet, and the forklift driver missed by about 8 inches. We were lucky. It graze the top of the case, leaving a pretty noticeable dent, but the machine itself was perfectly functional, and it still fit in the rack normally.

    Another interesting one was a shipment of 3 little 1u machines. They were light, and we were shipping a lot of stuff, so 3 were packed per box. The packing was done by a 3rd party under supervision of one of our managers. The box arrived, and I had to start taking pictures before I even opened it. The whole thing was oil soaked. It was clean motor oil, if I wasn't mistaken. The box couldn't even stand up under it's own weight. The peanuts inside were wet with the oil. Luckly, the machines were bagged, so they didn't get any oil on them at all.

    Then there are the instances of obvious abuse. Corners were crushed. There were marks from roll doors being closed on them. The occasional puncture where something was slammed into the side of it.

    Anyone who has worked in a warehouse knows, you're suppose to be very careful, but productivity is more important. You'll get written up if you break something and you're caught. If you don't keep your productivity up, you'll be looking for a job real quick.

    It doesn't help much that UPS is commonly known with the workers as "United Pot Smokers". :) The USPS has their own reputation for high stress, low pay, and the ability to drive folks to snap (i.e., "going postal"). I don't know if FedEx or DHL have anything like that, but I haven't personally known any employees from either one.

Re:Interesting but...

[sempir]

(My guess is "not very tightly," given that it sounds like the highest and lowest numbers of spikes (average) were the same planes, basically. That suggests that their method is flawed or that the results are that the means are basically the same to within any useful sense.)

I guess that that is about nearly as close as one on average can have a stab at. Sort of.

Re:Interesting but...

[CheshireCatCO]

I don't think you understand statistics, do you? That's the point of giving a standard error on your result: to qualify how well or how poorly you know anything. That way your reader can judge if your results are meaningful. If you're too lazy to calculate that (hint: it's only mildly harder than an average), don't report anything. What they did report means nothing without it, not the other way around.

Given how much time they spent on making fancy graphs that tells us nothing of value (see above), they really don't have an excuse.

Re:Interesting but...

[cshake]

FTFA:

The parcel was shipped a dozen times (we had neither the time nor the budget to make the hundreds of trips necessary for statistical significance), a modest experiment to see how the device performed and gather enough data to draw broad conclusions.

At least they're honest about it, I wish I saw that kind of disclaimer on more articles where it's needed even more.

Package Penetration

[Sponge Bath]

It would be interesting to include penetration of the box. I've had multiple UPS packages with large circular holes punched in the side and through a significant portion of the box as if it had lost a jousting match. I always wondered if it was the result of the sorting machinery getting out of hand.

On a side note, has anyone noticed Amazon switching to obscure brand carriers (OnTrac/Ensenda/Lasership) for shipping even 2-day Prime and overnight? These guys are basically non-uniformed individuals driving their personal vehicles to deliver, or more often, failing to deliver. I bet these same tests done for these carriers would be a real horror show.

Re:Package Penetration

[Anonymous Coward]

I get OnTrac with a lot of my Prime orders. I've never had much trouble with FedEx or UPS, but OnTrac is TERRIBLE.

Re:Package Penetration

[Anonymous Coward]

Your package is still under the seat of an arabian NY cab driver. Don't worry, it will be found in a few years perfectly preserved by a rigorous coating of gummibears and french fries.

Re:Package Penetration

[phillymjs]

It would be interesting to include penetration of the box. I've had multiple UPS packages with large circular holes punched in the side and through a significant portion of the box as if it had lost a jousting match.

At my last job, about 10 years ago, UPS dropped off a 21" CRT. The dead center of one side of the box had a hole in it the shape and size of one fork of a forklift, and there was the pleasant tinkling sound of broken glass when the box was moved. Unfortunately the receptionist who signed for it didn't notice that when it was dropped off. We didn't even bother to open the box, we just called the vendor and arranged a swap.

The president's office at that company was very close to where the UPS trucks would park when delivering to the building. One day I was in there working on her laptop when they pulled up outside. The driver went in the back, and then one by one I saw the packages for our building come arcing out and hitting the ground outside the truck.

After those incidents I stopped using UPS whenever possible. When I cannot avoid using them, I use an absurd amount of padding and insure the package up the wazoo.

Re:Package Penetration

[Anonymous Coward]

They are mainly local courier services, the type which businesses would use to send a package between two offices in the same city. I live nearby a large Amazon warehouse so occasionally I will get Lasership shipping. It doesn't matter what type of shipping I select, I have gotten them with overnight and super save shipping options. When I see Lasership on the shipping notice I know that without fail it will be delivered within 24 hours, to my front door. Often I will receive the email that morning and when I come home from work the package will be waiting for me. I have never had a problem at all with them. My friend shad a dvd mislaid by them, but Amazon was on the ball and fixed everything up with a new shipment, which Lasership got to their door the next day.

Re:Package Penetration

[Anonymous Coward]

We had a forklift drive into our package once. It destroyed a 3000W UPS. If they had been more malicious I'm sure there would have been a fire.

ALWAYS insure your package and expect it to be destroyed!

Re:Package Penetration

[hedwards]

That's not typical from my experience. Neither UPS nor Fed Ex typically operate like that. Sure it probably does happen, but not often and they'll likely get dealt with. The problem though is that UPS is strongly union and getting rid of a driver is really difficult they'll quite literally stop delivering to the building if the driver isn't being taken care of.

But, in my experience I used to run a loading dock at a highrise, and none of the drivers for UPS, Fed Ex or any of the major delivery companies ever did that sort of thing. And it was rare for me to see any of the boxes they were carrying more than a little bit crunched up.

I'd suspect that with a larger sample size that the results would turn out to be largely bunk. At my previous employers I saw literally hundreds of boxes being delivered and very, very few of them looked at all damaged. Sure it's not scientific, but it's a much larger sample size and more likely to indicate the true quality of service.

Re:Package Penetration

[schwnj]

I've noticed this a few times with OnTrac. I wondered whether the drivers were checking on the contents to see whether they'd *actually* deliver the package.

Re:Package Penetration

[Anonymous Coward]

We shipped several 1U servers cross country with UPS. I was waiting at the data center when they were delivered and watched as the UPS driver off-loaded our servers by sliding them to the back of the truck and flipping them out and onto the ground. They mostly landed on end, rather harshly, and then tipped over to smack flat on the ground. Luckily I had packed them all very thoroughly and removed all the hard drives prior to shipping. Still, I don't use UPS anymore.

Re:Package Penetration

[Anonymous Coward]

UPS dropped off a 21" CRT. The dead center of one side of the box had a hole in it the shape and size of one fork of a forklift, and there was the pleasant tinkling sound of broken glass when the box was moved.

Considering that UPS doesn't use forklifts except in the more recent UPS Freight acquisition... I find your story a little fabricated. There may be one forklift in a larger hub for very specific tasks, but everything travels via manpower, belts, or small electric carts with trains of cars (even big CRTs.) The fact of the matter is that there are usually so many belts in the operations that it's near impossible to even get a forklift near any packages.

Re:Package Penetration

[publiclurker]

Way back in the late 80's the company I worked for had a piece of computerized rest equipment shipped back to the company via UPS. apparently a forklift blade sliced right into the shipping box, through a tape drive slot and into the VME backplane. Unfortunately no-one noticed the slit in the box untill we plugged in the machine and it let loose a shower of sparks that would make an episode of Star Trek proud.

Re:Package Penetration

[FrozenFrog]

It would be interesting to include penetration of the box.

Tried that on a date once. Got my face slapped.

Frog

Re:Package Penetration

[WuphonsReach]

Way back in the late 80's the company I worked for had a piece of computerized rest equipment shipped back to the company via UPS. apparently a forklift blade sliced right into the shipping box, through a tape drive slot and into the VME backplane.

Which is a neat trick, because UPS in the 80s and 90s never uses forklifts to move items around. They didn't (don't) do pallet freight, which is where you see forklifts used. Everything moves through the facility on conveyor belts or roller lines.

More likely, some other item in the truck / tractor trailer, such as an "irregular" package probably impacted your package. Irregular packages are things that aren't boxes, which are too weird shaped, too heavy, or too fragile to travel the conveyor belts in the sorting facility. They tend to get loaded on carts and towed/moved around from the inbound to the outbound.

Re:Package Penetration

[publiclurker]

It wasn't just a blunt impact, since whatever did the damage had to go through the box and into the backplane of the test equipment. It may well have been another shipping company. The sales people that sent it back said it was UPS, but they were never the most trustworthy group.

Re:Package Penetration

[zmollusc]

Lol, UPS subcontracts just like everyone else. Been there, done that (been in a company that subcontracts from UPS, not been a forklift driver).

Re:Package Penetration

[siliconwafer]

All of my Amazon Prime shipments still continue to arrive via UPS.

Re:Package Penetration

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect the service quality provided varies by shipping hub and through time - i.e. most people see normal wear, tear and breakage, but some get to deal with that one hub that has that one supervisor that's pissing everyone in his shift off.

Re:Package Penetration

[Anonymous Coward]

and insure the package up the wazoo

Haha, good luck with that. They almost NEVER honor insurance claims. They'll let you put any amount of insurance on an item, but will NOT honor the claim without the original sales receipt. Doesn't really work when you're selling stuff on ebay.

Re:Package Penetration

[Anonymous Coward]

Insurance doesn't matter. I had a claim denied by UPS once because "I haven't approved a claim yet and I won't start with yours." They dropped a computer so hard the motherboard cracked inside.

Lesson learned: Make sure your package will survive a toss from the back of a truck at 4 feet. It will happen.

Also, insure for full MSRP and hope they just lose the package. Just like playing the lotto.

Re:Package Penetration

[Ixokai]

Yeah, I noticed Amazon doing that. It led to me sending a few very angry mails and eventually canceling my Prime subscription and only using Amazon as a last resort.

I used to get on average 2-3 packages a week from Amazon, all by UPS, every one arrived on time and only once was there any sort of damage at all. Then Amazon decides to switch out to some other carrier and suddenly my packages inevitably get flat out *dropped* on the ground outside my door and at most a vague sort of knock to alert me of its presence. The thump of the package hitting the ground was louder.

The main problem being not the drop, but that leaving packages on the doorstep of an *apartment building* is ridiculously stupid... especially without even the slightest attempt to knock on the door.

There's lots of horror stories about UPS on this story, but honestly I've had hundreds of packages delivered by them and almost no issues: but Amazon switching to these obscure little carriers for shipping lost them one customer here.

Re:Package Penetration

[Reziac]

I used to have to go down to UPS's regional sorting facility in Pacoima (Los Angeles) to pick up packages. The sorting conveyors were clearly visible from the pickup window. Two interesting points:

-- Boxes fell as far as ~30 feet in the course of being shifted from one conveyor belt to another.

-- There was a HUGE pile (probably 30-40 feet across and 15 feet high) of obviously smashed boxes (in all shapes and sizes) shoved into the back corner beyond the conveyors, clearly having been put there via forklift.
=====

My personal experience across the past 40 years has been that if you want something to arrive intact, use USPS.

And for ghu's sake, DON'T use Canada Post!

Re:Package Penetration

[oncebitter]

FedEx Ground was (or so I was told) a separate company initially, purchased by FedEx, and hence did not have the same quality standards. I sent a largish box to Atlanta once for pickup at the depot, following instructions from their 1-800 staff. The package disappeared for days until they finally tracked it down to some poor driver who had been trying to find "Hold At Depot Street" for 4 days. I was then informed they don't offer a hold-at-depot service.

It eventually got returned to me, to my billing address, not shipping address. As a final insult, I opened the door to my flat just in time to see the driver basically throw the box (now mangled beyond belief anyway, trailing styrofoam peanuts and cardboard bits) the last couple of feet onto my stairs. He looked at me and just said "What." then walked off.

Amazingly, the computer stuff inside was undamaged beyond a few bent bits of metal and some cracked plastic. What else to do but to hire a repair consultant (ie. me) to repair the damage (ie. bend the metal back with pliers) fabricate a stack of invoices for a fair repair cost (ie. 99% of the insured value) before reshipping with UPS.

To their credit they paid the claim without question.

Re:Package Penetration

[Uzuri]

I think it depends on where you are; If they're using small shippers, some of us will be lucky enough to be out of range. Ironic that suddenly out in the boonies means you're more likely to get the better companies.

USPS... gentle?

[lyinhart]

At first glance, the USPS being the most gentle seems to be surprising. But after further thought, I'm not the least bit surprised. I'm guessing that the private companies have more machines handling their packages and of course machines don't particularly care about being gentle with the box of cookies your grandma baked. The USPS on the other hand has been sort of notorious for hanging on to its considerable workforce (which is one of the reasons they're in their current financial situation), some of whom handle packages in lieu of automation.

Re:USPS... gentle?

[rolfwind]

OTOH, this:

'One disheartening result was that our package received more abuse when marked "Fragile" or "This Side Up."

was absolutely no surprise to me. Especially after seeing on youtube how some FedEx/UPS people handle normal packages, I can only expect that "Fragile" is a red flag to certain people who take a special sadistic delight in destroying stuff.

I have had hundreds of packages the last years, but the only one was beaten up was marked fragile. Luckily, the photographic lamps survived inside, but it was as if someone took a sledgehammer to it, it was that bashed in. Nothing else ever came close.

If you want something to survive shipping, don't make the package stand out in any special way, and secure the items correctly. Porcelain, glass, delicate figurines can all survive shipping, but only with proper packaging (sometimes a box in a box helps a lot if it's valuable enough) but don't rely on any shipping service to ever be delicate with it!

Re:USPS... gentle?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I worked security at a UPS hub, it was common practice for workers to "accidentally" knock packages marked Fragile off the conveyors. It was in particular danger if it was marked as carrying glass - it appeared that the sound of breaking glass was something magical to them. Graveyard shift was especially notorious for it.

Re:USPS... gentle?

[nickb64]

My mom's post office office had 30 clerks sorting letters when she started there nearly 26 years ago, they now have 3 clerks who not only sort letters, but also stuff PO Boxes, work the window when they need more bodies up there, and throw parcels. My mom now fills at least 2-3 positions on a daily basis, and it is impossible to get the mail out on time with their staff. The Postal Service is constantly offering people early retirement and a retiring bonus of about $15k, but lower percentage of one's salary during retirement. When people die or retire, they are not replaced.

Re:USPS... gentle?

[PPH]

At first glance, the USPS being the most gentle seems to be surprising.

Not really. Slow speed == low rates of acceleration == less damage.

The geezer who took my package at the USPS window this morning probably hasn't made it to the 'outgoing' bin yet.

Re:USPS... gentle?

[hedwards]

That probably explains the shitty record that USPS has at my parents house. It's rather routine for the mail to arrive at somebody else's house completely or be beaten up. There've been times when things would take an entire month to show up there, if they ever did at all.

Re:USPS... gentle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember USPS also contracts out to many airlines. So the same treatment that is given to luggage is given to packages.

Many carriers use the stuff as balest to balance cargo space instead of throwing in 100-500 pound weights. Also makes deadhead flights more profitable.

Best one I ever saw was 'fragile medical equipment'. The dude dead lifted thing over his shoulder and tossed and flipped it back onto the little cart. Impressive, but also like he went out of his way to abuse it.

Re:USPS... gentle?

[camperdave]

My mom now fills at least 2-3 positions...

Um... Nah! Too easy.

Re:USPS... gentle?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what financial situation is that? The USPS doesn't even rely on tax dollars to stay afloat; it operates entirely on revenue from mailings.

Would it not be more likely that they are more careful because they have a lower employee turnover rate, giving them people that actually *care* about what they do?

Re:USPS... gentle?

[Anonymous Coward]

The USPS on the other hand has been sort of notorious for hanging on to its considerable workforce (which is one of the reasons they're in their current financial situation)

Their current financial situation? You mean "turning a profit and sustaining themselves, unlike any other government agency"?

Re:USPS... gentle?

[nickb64]

even though she got her knee injured at work almost three years ago and still hasn't gotten it fixed(thanks to not having surgery approved) she gets to push around over 1000 pound carts of magazines and throw parcels(that's what they call it, not sure if it actually involves throwing) almost every day

External sensors

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen acceleration / impact stickers sensitive stickers for attaching to fragile packages that give a clear none resettable indication that it has been been abused to a greater or lesser extent. It would be interesting to see if the results were much different when the mail handlers knew their actions were being recorded, and would reveal if there are problems endemic to current working practices, or if workers gleefully abuse packages marked fragile with little or no fear of reprisal.

Re:External sensors

[omglolbah]

We ship a lot of sensitive equipment from where I work as we build control systems for oil rigs and other such fairly important sites.

If there is one thing you can be sure of is that we have both external and internal g-force sensors attached to the shipment. We also have tilt-sensor attached to anything we dont want tilted. If the transporter fucks up on that, they are usually in for a world of hurt.
When you're shipping something which is supposed to control the emergency shutdown system at a gas plant you want it to arrive just as happy as it was when it left the building.

This costs, but you get what you pay for.

I usually have my personal packages (ebay, amazon etc) shipped to my work address for one interesting reason: When the package is going to a business they tend to be a weee bit more careful. They want to keep the business after all ;)

One thing that surprised me a bit though.... UPS and USPS will send mail around the country on airplanes with a battery pack, a circuit board and various sensors in it?.... And TSA and the likes are worried about printer-toner?.... *facedesk*....

I like UPS

[Picardo85]

They call you and apologise if your package happens to be as much as an hour late. That's kind of sweet of them since I live on an island in the middle of the baltic sea :) But if we pay for 24 hour delivery, that's what we are supposed to get.

Re:I like UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, your UPS guys must be a lot cooler than the ones around here. I'm consider it lucky if they bring the package to the door. Expensive parts, medical supplies, live plants, whatever, find them everywhere, they just toss them off the truck and move on. Yeah, I've found medical stuff on the side of the road, like being in an FPS. They won't even ring the doorbell when it's obvious people are home to let anyone know there's something sitting outside. Maybe you have better luck, but I hate UPS. For anything important, I ask for FedEx delivery.

Re:I like UPS

[Picardo85]

Yeah, I've found medical stuff on the side of the road, like being in an FPS.

If i would have had a mod point i would have given one for funny.

Re:I like UPS

[Tridus]

The last time I used UPS, I had two packages marked fragile, set for saturday delivery.

The first problem was that they gave me bad information and the city in question didn't have saturday delivery available. But they still billed me for it.

One of the two packages arrived on the monday, in three pieces. The other package wound up in the wrong city. I got it a week later, also broken.

So, I dunno where this "call if its an hour late" stuff was, but they sure didn't want to talk to me after sending one package to the wrong city for a week and breaking both of them. Suffice to say that I refuse to have anything to do with them now.

Re:I like UPS

[zippthorne]

I like FedEx. They take the boxes off the truck every time the delivery run is over, so you can pick up your package at the distribution center if you miss the delivery (and it's not closed yet.)

Re:I like UPS

[omglolbah]

I hate fedex. Mostly because they chose to use a local company for deliveries here.

The local company has their own shipping labels.

So... My package has a fedex label with info like this on it:

John Geekman Doe
Squirrel street 123 apartment 321
Cityville 12345, Norway
Phone: +47 123-12-123

The local company label has everything but the apartment and phone number on it... BOTH labels are clearly readable...

I get to pick the package up at their distribution center 30 min out of the city because of an "Incomplete address information" problem....

Fuck em.

Re:I like UPS

[snakeplissken]

Yeah, I've found medical stuff on the side of the road, like being in an FPS.

but did walking over it automatically fix you up?

Re:I like UPS

[Lehk228]

must be a different regional manager, last package i had shipped UPS had a rather amusing tracking history, which i have to assume translated to "run over by a truck" as it said something along the lines of "lost due to weather" after a solid week of no updates, then "damaged/destroyed" and traced all the way back to the shipper. after that the tracking history was wiped and replaced with something much more generic

Re:I like UPS

[nitehawk214]

I like FedEx. They take the boxes off the truck every time the delivery run is over, so you can pick up your package at the distribution center if you miss the delivery (and it's not closed yet.)

I first read that as "the delivery is run over", which would be more in line with the other stories here.

Re:I like UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

I like FedEx. They take the boxes off the truck every time the delivery run is over, so you can pick up your package at the distribution center if you miss the delivery (and it's not closed yet.)

The catch being, most of the time they don't get back to the center until it's closed. And it's only for packages which require a signature, and even then only part of the time.

I had ordered a computer (full tower case) and I got home from my bartending job at 3am, only to find it was sitting in a window-well next to my front door, in the rain. This had been shipped with signature required.
I called them and said "Hey, my tracking shows this was delivered. It's not delivered." They said "the notes say it was delivered next to the door." I said "That's funny, I was at work until 3am, I live alone, and have the only key to the door. Who signed for it?" She said "Well, we have a signature here." I said "If I had really signed for it, why the fuck would I have the driver leave it next to the door? There isn't any package here."
After a lot of bad noise, I got sick of their BS and called the company and said "Hey, I never got my order. I never signed for any packages, but YOUR shipping carrier is trying to claim I did. I want my computer here in 3 business days or lawsuits are going to start." They shipped me a new one, and I never heard back about it.

Incidentally, the one that had been soaking in the rain was at least salvagable for some basic parts, although the motherboard and most of the components were toast.

Re:I like UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

I think most of what shapes people's personal experience with shippers is determined by the last leg of the journey, from the local shipping center to their house.

In San Francisco, I used to get lots of books and such mail order and the delivery guy and I were on pretty friendly terms. One day I was about a half mile away, using and ATM, when I started walking away and the UPS guy was waiting for me at the curb with a small package. Nice dude.

In another city, I never met any of the delivery people, had deliveries experiences such as a mysterious hole in a box that smashed through a synth's keybed, and had to deal all too often with driving down to the industrial area on the other side of town just to pick up a package. I really hated UPS there.

By the way, I recently moved and sent 18 packages cross-country via USPS. Every single one of them arrived okay, except for the lone one that didn't have insurance because the cashier messed up and I didn't correct her; that one was crushed, missing more than half the books, and just had a little "sorry" note in it. After that, it's hard not to believe (unscientifically) that the handlers at the postal service don't light up with glee when they see uninsured packages. I wonder if they just take the shit, though it's hard to believe there are many fans of both Nabokov and real and complex analysis at the post office.

Re:I like UPS

[Reziac]

That's why UPS has my address on "Signature Required" delivery status now -- stuff randomly left wherever the driver got tired of looking for my house. (Which can't be TOO hard, since there's all of two houses anywhere in sight.)

When it was the same driver for a long time, I only had to get after him ONCE. Now it's a different guy every time so there's no point in trying to train 'em.

Re:I like UPS

[StikyPad]

If not, try getting really close and saying "F" or "E".

Re:I like UPS

[Uzuri]

Frankly, that's why I hate FedEx. They always seem to miss me. I think they drive by, see the driveway, and decide they don't want to try it because, hey, I can always drive an hour and a half during working hours to pick up my package! So convenient! Way more convenient than the driver actually carefully turning into the steep drive and turning around at the bottom, you know. Because doing anything other than blazing down at top speed, flinging the package at the garage door, and backing out at 90 mph into traffic is too hard for these people.

UPS trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had more trouble with UPS than any other. I and a friend ordered plates. Both boxes shipped to differeny locations came with broken despite being very well packed, the boxes were man handled. Fed ex seems easier on things. USPS seems fine to me as well, they delivered two glass bottles to me last week unscathed.

Thats my unscientific mini analysis.

Re:UPS trouble

[SpeZek]

I seem to have terrible luck with both UPS and USPS.

My Xmas present from last year, shipped USPS from AZ to MB, Canada, had a nice 6 month layover at US Customs before being shipped back to AZ

UPS, on the other hand, decided to deliver birthday presents addressed to me to the wrong house and forge a signature twice

Merry Xmas to me... I'm hoping to receive something this year, but I'm not getting my hopes up. This time we're crossing our fingers and using FedEx, if only to see how they'll fuck up.

Meanwhile, every time I've shipped something down to AZ (including a small computer, via USPS Ground) it's arrived perfectly intact and on-time. Must just be me...

Re:UPS trouble

[Eskarel]

The fact that customs decided to be a dick isn't really the USPS's fault, since despite both being government departments they have nothing to do with one another.

Re:UPS trouble

[SpeZek]

True, but like I said, I shipped a whole computer I put together, assembled, in a plain brown box, and it made it through fine. The Xmas gift that got stuck for security in question... was a pocket watch, a shirt, and some misc. items.

You'd think the thing that would get the most scrutiny would be the PC.

Re:UPS trouble

[Eskarel]

I'm not saying that the 6 month layover wasn't stupid, I'm just saying that it's customs being stupid not the USPS.

Re:UPS trouble

[smurd]

It's actually even stupider.
Your computer wasn't Running! A simple AM radio on the conveyer
would pick up the RFI if it was alive.

Just wait, this post will be replaced with a DHS/TSA emblem.
 

Whenever I have something delivered

[hsmith]

I just imagine it is handled with the same care as the opening scene of Ace Ventura.
DHL is the worst, I had electronics shipped from China and the box came soaked with water. Never have had a good experience with them.

Re:Whenever I have something delivered

[cdrudge]

DHL is the worst, I had electronics shipped from China and the box came soaked with water.

Next time don't ask for ground shipping from China. Pay the extra and go with air. Or at least by boat.

Re:Whenever I have something delivered

[omglolbah]

Get this...

Intel uses DHL.

I had a broken CPU (DOA from the webshop) and had it returned on warranty.

The new one went out the next day with DHL "2 day shipping".

It took thirteen days for the CPU to arrive at my place... Why? DHL lost the warranty-paperwork they were given by intel. It took them -thirteen- days to get a copy of a damn slip of paper...

Intel were not amused when I called after a week asking what the holdup was.. Apparently DHL hadnt contacted them about it yet... Meh...

Re:Whenever I have something delivered

[Anonymous Coward]

I just imagine it is handled with the same care as the opening scene of Ace Ventura.

GOD PLEASE MOD PARENT UP That made me cry laughing, hahahah

Re:Whenever I have something delivered

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, no one finished their tunnel to China yet? My parents made me stop when I hit the septic tank, but I figured someone would be done by now.

Re:Whenever I have something delivered

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, he probably went by boat. I've had stuff shipped by ground from China before. Only two melted packages in three years.

Re:Whenever I have something delivered

[HeronBlademaster]

About three years ago Dell replaced a laptop for me. The replacement was sent via DHL, and it arrived quickly and unharmed. The return shipping label was also for DHL, and the driver arrived on time for the scheduled pickup. As far as I recall that's the only time I've used DHL, but it was certainly painless.

Re:Whenever I have something delivered

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, the rate would have been higher if I'd had more than three packages shipped from China in three years.

Re:Whenever I have something delivered

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the compressive deformation would make the packages quite unrecognizable. What happens to an capacitor in 11 km of depth stays in 11 km of depth, as they say..

What studies are the most useless?

[dmiracle]

Error bars? Standard deviations? Neat device, but (as Again said) the data sets are too small to make any claims.

ups / fedex push to much in there conveyor systems

[Joe The Dragon]

ups / fedex push to much in there conveyor systems they put in more then the system is build to handle and that how things can get lost.

Re:ups / fedex push to much in there conveyor syst

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. My brain hurts.

No surprise here

[Nidi62]

As anyone who has ever worked at an airport, delivery service, or any other place involving shipping or delivery would know, "Fragile" translates to "Throw me" in thrower-speech. In fact, I usually warn against labeling it as such and instead suggest ways to add padding.

Re:No surprise here

[dropzonetoe]

Add the Army too... I worked in a postal unit for a month and saw everything just get thrown in the back of the truck. Fragile got thrown harder.

Re:No surprise here

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mark things as fragile for the handlers, I mark them fragile for the end recipient to check the package extra-carefully before signing for it. I used to work as a lumper for a big warehousing company and we often didn't give a shit about handling practices. The end customer needs to know, however, that they need to check the package as it's fragile and has probably been manhandled quite considerably. Yes you take extra care in packaging, but at times that isn't enough.

Re:ups / fedex push to much in there conveyor syst

[Anonymous Coward]

Like radioactive fuel rods?

Proper packaging

[Anonymous Coward]

In my time, I have shipped millions of dollars worth of equipment. It has never arrived damaged. OTOH, the packaging I used added a lot to the cost of delivery. If the equipment matters enough, it is worth packing properly.

If you doubt that packaging can make the difference, check out egg drop competitions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_drop_competition Basically, you can build a package that can be dropped from any height without breaking the egg that it contains.

Re:Proper packaging

[PremiumCarrion]

Whenever people mention the egg dropping stuff I'm reminded of a slack day in seocndary school.
So yeah we all got into our teams and made a parachute or some padding with our lackluster materials, but one team couldn't be bothered, so their entry was the egg itself.

We thought they'd made a hilarious mistake... 4 stories high and the damn thing bounced, we broke the egg thinking it must have been hard boiled, that was the real mistake.

Re:Proper packaging

[zelbinion]

A friend in college had to do the "egg drop" as a 101 physics class assignment. He lived in a dorm that was 80% engineering students (including me) so he came to ask us for help. We decided the best design was to core halfway to the center of a watermelon, place the egg inside, remove enough material from the core we had extracted to account for the egg, replace the cored section, and tape it shut. Of course we had to test it first. So, at 1 am one frosty January night in Moscow, ID, we dropped the watermelon from the third floor of a building. Upon impact, the watermelon exploding on the sidewalk dissipated most of the energy. The egg came through in one piece, but had a small crack in it. We decided it would have been better to let the watermelon dry out a bit more the next time, to allow the flesh of fruit to compact a little more on impact. We had also failed to account for the little bits of melon that quickly froze to the sidewalk and were immovable for three weeks until we got a day above freezing.

So, the next time you want to ship something UPS, put it inside a watermelon. No ShockWatch sticker needed. If they are too rough on your package, they will get sprayed by watermelon chunks, and it will be obvious something bad happened when your package arrives.

Re:Proper packaging

[pnutjam]

I once had to do an egg drop at a stupid temp job (team building crap). Their rules were very specific, but did not forbid blowing the egg out. Two quick pinholes, one empty egg shell, a quick layer of scotch tape and our "egg" could handle almost any distance drop. The damn thing was so light it didn't have enough mass to crack the shell.

Wait, why?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Are people who work in such places just spiteful?

Re:Wait, why?

[Nidi62]

Not necessarily. When you have a flight scheduled to go out in 15-20 minutes and have had 30-40 bags gate checked, you don't have time to carry them down the stairs one by one. You have to just throw them down the chute. You don't have the time to think about what's in them. Of course, I am sure there are some out there that are just spiteful.

Re:Wait, why?

[Tridus]

Ever watched the guys at the airport who load and unload luggage? Same deal. They don't give a shit, it's not their stuff and there's no accountability for mishandling cargo.

Re:Wait, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Working in freight is some of the most physically demanding work you can do. It entails constantly running around hauling heavy ass stuff. Imagine taking a loaded suitcase, lifting it up, and then doing a few laps around your house. That will give you a good idea to what the first few minutes of a twelve hour shift in freight is like.

Re:Wait, why?

[Eskarel]

Not exactly.

What they are is generally is people who are paid badly and whose only required qualification is the ability to lift a certain weight. Which translates to "muscular 18-25 year old males with no education". Think of any 18-25 year old males you know or to what you were like back then if you were. Personally I was a dickhead, and your average UPS employee is probably worse.

I knew a guy who used to work in one of those places and he said that they used to have competitions as to who could break more fragile packages. They're bored, they're stupid, and they're not looking for a lot of career advancement.

Re:Wait, why?

[Bigjeff5]

To be fair, they don't have time to give a shit.

Re:Wait, why?

[CoderBob]

When I worked the loading docks for FedEx in college, it isn't a question of spite. It's overuse of the "Fragile" stickers without adequate packaging.

Take, for example, the current crop of TVs. Some idiot orders one from buy.com or walmart.com, and a 52" TV that is delivered to the stores, 3 at a time, banded to a skid, is instead just picked up, a shipping label slapped on it, and out the door to the UPS/FedEx/other small parcel carrier of choice. These items are not packaged correctly for that kind of shipment- which is why, if you read the fine print, most carriers are not liable for damages to them.

Or, for a more "WTFBBQ?" example, let's say I'm shipping, to you, restaurant-grade plates. Nice, solid, plates, dishwasher safe. If you were a restaurant supply business that gets these in regularly with the "FRAGILE" markings all over the package, you laugh at the labeling. Inside, there is a latticework of corrugated cardboard, if you're lucky double-walled, that seperates each plate into a compartment. There is no other packaging. No bubble wrap. Nothing to hold structural integrity. There is about 50 pounds of china in this package, and each plate is separated from it's neighbor by.... a piece of cardboard.

After watching packages like that come through, over and over again, people quit caring about "FRAGILE". If the shipper can't be bothered to package something in a manner that it would survive a 3 to 5 foot drop (depending on carrier) the carrier isn't liable anyway. People tend to put more and more stickers on things that are packaged poorly. If it's packaged well, short of getting run over by the delivery van, it shouldn't be damaged in shipping. Not that accidents don't happen- FedEx, for instance, uses conveyor systems to get packages from trailers to the delivery vans, and the system allows for "sorters" to push packages off one conveyor down chutes to a second. In theory there should be no damage here, again, but sometimes packages will jam in the conveyor, or stick in the chutes, and before the busy handler notices there is a 145 pound UPS battery pack jammed up against your mother's crystal. It happens.

Add in people who ship lawnmowers with oil already in the engine- "THIS SIDE UP". Well, newsflash: it has to go in the delivery van. There is only so much room in one of these, and if your box doesn't FIT under the shelves in the back "THIS SIDE UP", and doesn't fit in the aisle between the shelves where the driver can get around it, it WILL end up on a side, probably leaking oil into parts of the motor it shouldn't be in. Far too many shippers don't actually know how packages are handled once they leave their facilities and just assume "cheaper is better".

If I seem bitter about this, it's because I've seen a lot of it. I've been the guy sorting between conveyors and had a poorly packaged box spill shards of glass all over. I've watched co-workers take a bath in acid because some idiot didn't know how to package his hazardous materials for shipping. I've had a printer from a major manufacturer get shipped in the nice shiny cardboard box you see it in at the store, with the single strip of cheap tape holding the box shut fall out of the bottom of the box when I picked it up. I've lost count of how many times I've seen someone cram a box that was too small for the contents just so they wouldn't pay the upcharge for the next size up oversize shipping. Or hardcover books shipped in cheap, paper envelopes that are just a half inch too small- so the corners of the books tear the paper, regardless of handling. Shippers tend to look at it from an overall business perspective. It's the Fight Club recall thing all over- if the cost of better packaging is more than the cost of dealing with damaged goods, they'll keep the craptastic packaging.

Re:Wait, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, sure. But your original claim was that "fragile" makes them throw the stuff extra hard -- or at least you warn people against marking things "fragile". Why?

Re:Wait, why?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Neither of which has anything to do with these guys treating stuff marked "Fragile" even worse, to the point where the OP would actually warn against using "Fragile".

Are you saying they don't have time to give a shit, but they do have time to be deliberately rougher with fragile stuff than with non-fragile stuff?

Re:Wait, why?

[SanityInAnarchy]

I get that. I do. People package stuff wrong -- under-packaged, over-packaged, or just stupidly packaged. If I want it to get there safely, I shouldn't count on "fragile", I should package properly.

What I don't get is why you'd warn against labeling that way, or why you'd treat a potentially-poorly-packaged "fragile" package worse than a normal one, other than bitterness.

Re:Wait, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

This might sound off-topic at first, but give me a moment. I had a friend applying for a bank teller job (this in the UK btw - not sure if this would apply for US), and we were both astounded by the deal he was being offered to work there - pay in the range of £18k-£24k (well above the average for unskilled work) discounts on mortgage rates, special deals on the current accounts and free financial advice (legally guaranteed financial advice, as opposed to the standard). The way the bank explained it was simple, "as long as our staff are financially secure, they are happy, feel safe and don't have half-as-much motivation to steal from us". We get this in a lot of jobs where vast amounts of concentration is required as well - can't have staff worried about home-lives during work, lets help remove some of the worries.

Its a simple idea: if you are going to pay someone to do some work, you might want to consider paying them a little more than the standard rate to get a little better treatment. I think the US covers this in places like waitressing and delivering food etc. via tipping - but over here a lot of companies take the idea of just paying their staff better to do a better job. This is falling out fashion fast during a recession unfortunately, but people's willingness to work just to the letter of their job (or less) will ensure that it makes a comeback, I'm sure.

TLDR - You get what you pay for, fuckers.

Re:Wait, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

My best friend worked for UPS because his football coach told the whole (HS) team
to work for the local UPS for the summer. He had some very wild stories about stuff,
like employees playing with a horse's head that came out of a package. (Stupid...
why would someone ship a horse's head? [Think biological testing and nasty diseases.])

Another friend here in MN worked for a company that supplies semiconductor makers
with gear. They sent packages with recording accelerometers through all their shippers
on occasion, and regularly found 8' dead drops. From the timing, it was likely when the
packages were being on/off-loaded from aircraft.

Re:Wait, why?

[CoderBob]

Keep in mind the average dock worker is limited to 25 to 30 hours a week, at ten bucks an hour or so, and are encouraged to get off the clock as quickly as possible. Many of them are college students, who may or may not be hungover. Not an excuse, just insight.

The other point, and one that is commonly lost, is that fragile stickers imply self-importance. The shipper assumes their package is more important than any other package in the system. More stickers imply an even greater and greater sense of self importance. This can definitely create an environment where the package will be handled in a rough manner through spite. To extend the common car analogy, it would be like taking your car in to the mechanic with strict guidelines on how he sits in the car, starts the car, turns the wheel, or any other commonplace operation he would need to perform. Even though they are underpaid workers who might not have great motivation, they do usually have enough of a sense of self-worth that some moron slapping 8 fragile stickers on a box is going to piss them off.

Ideally, unless the package has orientation issues (liquid in a container, which should be labeled as such instead of just "Fragile") or is in some other way incredibly dainty, it shouldn't need fragile stickers. When I worked there, any package handler (official job title, sadly) seen throwing a package was fired. No ifs, ands, or buts. Didn't matter if it had a fragile sticker or not.

Re:Wait, why?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Not an excuse, just insight.

That's exactly what I'm looking for.

The other point, and one that is commonly lost, is that fragile stickers imply self-importance. The shipper assumes their package is more important than any other package in the system.

Not "more important", but more fragile than most. I doubt anyone puts "fragile" on something just because they feel important, and I doubt anyone assumes there are no other "fragile" packages.

To extend the common car analogy, it would be like taking your car in to the mechanic with strict guidelines on how he sits in the car, starts the car, turns the wheel, or any other commonplace operation he would need to perform.

More like, "The seats are imported leather/sheepskin/whatever, please be careful." Not detailed instructions on what to do and what not to do, just don't be a dick and get mud or grease on the seats.

I suppose your point is that they wouldn't be doing that anyway, so since they aren't needed, it's annoying to see them.

In a just world...

[msauve]

they wouldn't be working there long. Also, it makes me wonder why you have reprobates as friends.

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, it makes me wonder why you have reprobates as friends.

Just check the posting history of all his alt accounts, and all will become clear.

Re:In a just world...

[Eskarel]

I worked with a guy when I was young who was an ex UPS employee, he told similar stories.

The reality is that the guys working in the shipping center are generally young, unskilled, and paid crap. Even if they actually got fired for screwing around(which they generally don't), they'd just be replaced with another batch of idiots.

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, with the Union, they'll just get hired back after crying to the Union.

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

you are NOTHING

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

msauve, as a spoiler, here's what's coming for you. He will keep calling you an idiot even though he is wrong the entire time. Then, he will call you a coward, and suggest that you give out your "given name" and address. He will give you a fake address to entice you. If you try to argue with him, he will say something dumb, followed by "moron". After that, he will call you a coward again and ask for your given name. He will also threaten to kill you with his multiple weapons.

In reality, the guy needs a psychiatrist. Do not argue with him, and if he threatens you, call the cops.

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget his favourite: "your mums face [second half of a sentence you said]"

For example, he's currently reading the parents post and is about to post a comment saying "your mums face needs a psychiatrist".

yes, that's right Kristopeit. I can read your thoughts. the only way to get me out of your head is to put an electric drill through it.

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

And so it begins. Dance, monkey, dance!

Re:In a just world...

[Mikey Kristopeity]

you are a coward and a hypocrite, and everyone knows that i'll need a bullet instead of a drill to get you out of my head.

i invite you to try. i live at
1313 Mockingbird Lane
Mockingbird Heights, CA

i have guns, dogs, curtains, and a box fort in my livingroom.

you have nothing because you are NOTHING.

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

you are a coward and a hypocrite,

"You"? Ah-ha. I assume you're aware that more then one person can actually post as Anonymous Coward? You're dealing with more then one person posting as Anonymous Coward. We are many.

and everyone knows that i'll need a bullet instead of a drill to get you out of my head.

Perhaps even bullets!

i invite you to try. i live at
1313 Mockingbird Lane
Mockingbird Heights, CA

Ah, you watch "The Munsters" too I see.

i have guns, dogs, curtains, and a box fort in my livingroom.

Gee. For someone, like the rest of us, who live in our moms' house that is impressive. Next you'll tell us you have a girlfriend too!

you have nothing because you are NOTHING.

Replace the "you" with "we" and you'll still have nothing.

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fun fact: Mikey Kristopeity is the only real Michael Kristopeit.

All others are impostures.

Re:In a just world...

[Mikey Kristopeity]

Next you'll tell us you have a girlfriend too!

try 'wife', coward. rachel is now semi-professional on the donkey show circuit, soon to be promoted to ponies and small mustangs.

i studied for years to earn my a+ cert by my 29th birthday, and now assistant manage my local geeksquad branch.

why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

you are NOTHING.

Re:In a just world...

[nospam007]

If you pay peanuts, only monkeys will work for you.

Re:In a just world...

[DocHoncho]

I'm starting to think "Michael Kristopeit" is really some kind of bizarre meta-troll. God only knows how many accounts are registered for this persona and by how many distinct individuals. Reminds me of when I was in high school, my friends and I would all log in to a local Public Access Unix system (grex.cyberspace.org) under the same account and mess with people in the chat room thing they had.

Ahh the good old days.

Re:In a just world...

[Eskarel]

True, and you know how monkeys like to throw stuff.

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

..and elephants, not that that's any better though.

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

Factory workers are the same way, just so you know.

Actually, we mostly have responsible ones right now. But we used to have some people who were walking soap operas. Ever see someone working on a production line while shouting into the phone at his baby momma? Yeah, it's not like he was holding something breakable or dangerous like glass at the time or anything. Oh wait, yes he was... In case you're wondering how it played out, in the end they fired the safety guy to save money. And that was one of the tamer stories.

They did finally fire that one, but it was because he got sent to jail. If we still needed another person, I honestly believe that they'd rehire him.

Re:In a just world...

[El_Muerte_TDS]

And elephants.

Re:In a just world...

[geminidomino]

That's the Munster's address. Now STFU and go get your thorazine.

Re:In a just world...

[digitalhermit]

Yeah, I worked at UPS. It wasn't only the employees.

In our Hialeah sort facility we had a device called a BullFrog which sorted packages along a conveyor belt. In its initial stages it didn't work quite correctly and some packages made it through to the end and just *fell* about ten feet into a bin for reprocessing.

During the peak season (i.e., right now), thousands of packages would travel through chutes meant for hundreds of packages. During regular days there would be a jam every few minutes as oversize packages clogged the chutes. In peak it was much worse. Packages would crush up against each other and an employee would need to walk up the conveyor belt and clear the jams. Many packages were damaged at these times.

There are very explicit rules against damaging packages and penalties can include termination. However, the volume of packages during peak is enormous and loaders fall behind, package cars get overloaded and need to be "assisted" to add extra packages, and sometimes yes, there are some bad employees.

Is it better at other companies? Not necessarily. I received a package via FedEx that was accordianed. It looked like the box was compressed from about 12" to about 5". And they still delivered it in that condition.

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are thinking elephants. Which after looking at the package's crush damage may explain some things.

if you want to hire monkeys then offer bananas.

Re:In a just world...

[MichaelKristopeit213]

"Mikey Kristopeity" is operated by a pathetic individual attempting to steal my identity.

to the individual responsible: present yourself to me; admit what you've done, then i will bring upon you the ultimate punishment for your transgressions.

Re:In a just world...

[MichaelKristopeit203]

"Mikey Kristopeity" is operated by a pathetic individual attempting to steal my identity.

to the individual responsible: present yourself to me; admit what you've done, then i will bring upon you the ultimate punishment for your transgressions.

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, I thought elephants worked for peanuts... don't monkeys work for bananas?

Re:In a just world...

[Coren22]

That is the funniest thing I have read, thank you. You deserve a medal for trolling the troll.

Re:In a just world...

[Coren22]

No, that would be Honcho, the Doc he got from medical school.

Re:In a just world...

[MichaelKristopeit203]

and who asked you to tell me?

still sore that i pointed out your shortcomings regarding understanding of logic?

you're still an idiot.

choosing prejudice in the face of empirical evidence is IGNORANT HYPOCRISY.

go tell the other 21 morons.

Re:In a just world...

[Coren22]

You are such an enjoyable troll. Maybe when you are old enough to move out you will have grown out of the need for attention.

Re:In a just world...

[MichaelKristopeit212]

maybe you'll never not be an idiot.

ur mum's face are such an enjoyable troll.

Re:In a just world...

[MichaelKristopeit204]

re-moderating your troll posts with your network of moderation enabled accounts?

you're completely pathetic.

"Mikey Kristopeity" is operated by a pathetic individual attempting to steal my identity. they hypocritically game the systems of control on this website while condemning my use of multiple user accounts.

to the individual responsible: present yourself to me; admit what you've done, then i'll bring upon you the ultimate punishment for your transgressions.

Re:In a just world...

[MichaelKristopeit203]

re-moderating your troll posts with your network of moderation enabled accounts?

you're completely pathetic.

"Mikey Kristopeity" is operated by a pathetic individual attempting to steal my identity. they hypocritically game the systems of control on this website while condemning my use of multiple user accounts.

to the individual responsible: present yourself to me; admit what you've done, then i'll bring upon you the ultimate punishment for your transgressions.

Re:In a just world...

[MichaelKristopeit201]

putting words in someone else's mouth, and then condemning them for them = insightful.

slashdot = stagnated.

considering the people i'm talking about worked at UPS playing "package hockey" for 6 years and were offered promotions that they they turned down to pursue careers in the field of their earned degrees, you're also an ignorant hypocrite.

you're completely pathetic.

Re:In a just world...

[Coren22]

Again with acting like a 12 year old? You are funny, and pathetic all in one. I am done responding to your trollish behavior, so enjoy it.

Re:In a just world...

[MichaelKristopeit212]

you're the meek moron applauding others for attacking me while you yourself cower in your own ignorance and hypocrisy.

you're completely pathetic.

Re:In a just world...

[Anonymous Coward]

At least they haven't started eating stuff too.

I Mark Mine

[Greyfox]

"Do Not Impale With Spear". So far none of the packages that I've sent this way have been impaled with spears.

Re:I Mark Mine

[Picardo85]

In Soviet Russia packages mark you !

Re:I Mark Mine

[Arancaytar]

That seems risky. You don't want to tempt them.

Re:I Mark Mine

[MachDelta]

I worked for UPS a long time ago, and one time someone shipped something that worked quite well as a spear. It was maybe a foot long and looked like a giant screw-eye hook. Must have weighed 30 pounds. My co-worker javelin-hurled it at a bunch of packages. It punched a giant hole in the side of something. We all laughed because we were young and stupid.

Re:I Mark Mine

[Verteiron]

This is a good idea. I once had UPS deliver a small kiosk to me that had been punctured through the LCD, through the oak cabinet, and through the receipt printer with a round object about 2 inches in diameter (measured the 6 entry/exit holes). We blamed spears. UPS said that we shipped it that way.

6 months later, they paid us for it.

Re:I Mark Mine

[Anonymous Coward]

> So far none of the packages that I've sent this way have been impaled with spears.

Judging from some of the stories here, you just haven't sent enough packages yet....

Re:I Mark Mine

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish I had this advice some years back! Should have labeled a box "Do Not Run Over With Forklift". Then maybe FedEx wouldn't have had to re-box the crushed electronics into a shiny new box (including the crushed box with tread marks) so that I'd sign for it. Frickin' scumbags!

Re:I Mark Mine

[ShavedOrangutan]

I always write "DO NOT FOLD" on the side of large boxes. Hasn't happened yet!

Re:I Mark Mine

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the fork from a forklift count as a 'spear'?

Perhaps you've not sent many large packages.

Re:I Mark Mine

[Reziac]

I'm wondering if you should include another warning:

"Caution: Inflatable Lion. Any puncture will cause it to inflate."

Re:ups / fedex push to much in there conveyor syst

[Anonymous Coward]

ups / fedex push to much in there conveyor systems they put in more then the system is build to handle and that how things can get lost.

Wow. I'll just pretend that you're trolling grammarists.

The plural of anecdote is data?

[jpallas]

The number of times they tested the same route with the same carrier was 0. The results are meaningless.

Re:The plural of anecdote is data?

[Gadget_Guy]

The number of times they tested the same route with the same carrier was 0. The results are meaningless.

Nice one, Sherlock. They did say that in TFA:

"The parcel was shipped a dozen times (we had neither the time nor the budget to make the hundreds of trips necessary for statistical significance), a modest experiment to see how the device performed and gather enough data to draw broad conclusions."

Fortunately this wasn't submitted for a peer review journal.

Re:The plural of anecdote is data?

[Bigjeff5]

If you had bothered to read the first paragraph, they said exactly that.

Dumbass.

Re:The plural of anecdote is data?

[jpallas]

Yeah, but they didn't "gather enough data to draw broad conclusions." They didn't gather enough data to draw any conclusions at all. That didn't stop them from drawing conclusions and publishing them.

Just as an example, suppose that marking your package "Fragile" actually results in better handling on average. Telling people the opposite of that is not just publishing entertaining stories, it's doing actual harm.

Yes, I read the article. But many people won't, so putting that crap in the summary without any caveats isn't much better than just making stuff up. Slashdot is supposed to be "stuff that matters."

Re:The plural of anecdote is data?

[Gadget_Guy]

Just as an example, suppose that marking your package "Fragile" actually results in better handling on average. Telling people the opposite of that is not just publishing entertaining stories, it's doing actual harm.

Oh yes, that is actually a very good point. I was wrong in thinking of this as a harmless discussion because I didn't consider the real consequences to people believing what this stuff. I have been disadvantaged by some misinformation on this site before, so I'm amazed that I didn't pick up on this point.

Slashdot is supposed to be "stuff that matters."

I thought they gave up on that idea a long time ago!

Re:The plural of anecdote is data?

[HeronBlademaster]

Slashdot is supposed to be "stuff that matters."

I stopped trusting Slashdot for pretty much any remotely important information when I realized that the editors don't even fact-check the headlines, let alone the summaries. Anyone who trusts something posted on Slashdot without reading the source article deserves the misinformation they're probably getting.

Re:The plural of anecdote is data?

[TangoMargarine]

Hundreds of trips my ass, even 10 on each would have at least been worth something.

Re:The plural of anecdote is data?

[sempir]

Frankly i stopped trusting them with my parcels too! As far as facts and information are concerned I'm pretty happy with the links etc they give, and as for the people that post here........fucking brilliant! Never a dull moment.

Re:The plural of anecdote is data?

[Reziac]

Consistent with my experience across 40 years of parcels shipped with whatever the sender used, tho. USPS is most reliable, UPS the worst.

Local TV station has run tests several times at Xmas, and reached the same conclusion.

Lately I had UPS put my address on "Signature only" because their moron drivers were leaving stuff at random places down the driveway or next door, and couldn't even be arsed to put stuff on the porch out of the weather (ie. the direct sun which here does a nice job of cooking electronics).

Re:The plural of anecdote is data?

[SleazyRidr]

Since they actually have something, surely they did at least some at least once.

Shock Watch indicators help.

[Technician]

When you plaster this on the outside of the package, I find the damage is less.

http://www.agmcontainer.com/shock_indicators/shock_indicators_labels.htm

The companies are good at trying to avoid claims. Some monkeys like to see what the tripped indicator looks like and test them, tripping the outside indicators, but not tripping ones inside the box.

Re:Shock Watch indicators help.

[Anonymous Coward]

The inside story I got about these things is that the shipping workers often take them off and put on new ones. I work in a University lab where we ship lots of stuff out for repairs, so my sources are reliable, I think.

Re:Shock Watch indicators help.

[omglolbah]

That is why you put one on the inside of the package. If the inside one is tripped but the outside is not, you know the shipper is fiddling with them.

We also commonly sign across the border of them with a sharpie-type pen to make it bloody hard to do just that.

Re:Shock Watch indicators help.

[seanthenerd]

Nice! Is it possible to get just the stickers, for cheaper? :)

Re:Shock Watch indicators help.

[Technician]

Yes, Write the company. You can get labels that indicate the reciever needs to inspect the Shock Watch indicator inside the package, or generate your own sticker. Shock watch indicators on the outside of the package often will get crushed or damaged in handeling. A sticker indicating an internal sensor should help but is not nearly as effective when making a claim. Insurance can claim the indicator was already tripped when delivered to your carrier. An untripped indicator on the box when they pick it up is more useful if you have to make a damage claim. An outside and inside indicator tripped when delivered makes a good case for a claim, especially if you insist they are present when you open the package for inspection because the outside indicator is tripped, missing, replaced, etc.

One of the most interesting orders we had damaged was a case of the indicators. This was obviously a fragile shipment, clearly marked, and the package arrived with the outside indicators tripped. Needless to say, having them present when the inside was inspected and most of the shipment was tripped was a clear insurance claim.

Re:Shock Watch indicators help.

[Neil Boekend]

And you can use them to test whether your crash test dummy has sustained damage when you blow him up/throw him of a building/crash a car with him in it.

Re:Shock Watch indicators help.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else works? Marking things "Biohazard."

No one wants to penetrate the biohazard box.

Re:Shock Watch indicators help.

[Reziac]

Nice concept. Roughly what do they cost you per shipment? (Don't see any pricing offhand on their site.)

Re:Shock Watch indicators help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I order these they arrive at my house already tripped...

firsthand experience...

[alanshot]

ESPECIALLY with two man lift rated boxes, UPS is FAR worse than others.

we use UPS daily at my company to receive shipments because they are fastest from "Brown". Unfortunately, boxes of all sizes and shapes arrive in less than perfect condition, and several % of them arrive actually opened (and some missing product).

Fedex, not a single problem. (although we receive less than 5% of our shipments from them so its not a fair shake)

From our regular UPS driver: they use LOTS of temp help, and lots of automation. both are HELL on boxes as they get flipped and tossed around, and most times THROWN from place to place. (he tells me this as he is in his truck, standing/walking ON somebody else's boxes to reach some of our stuff)

Case in point:

We ordered a dozen new servers from dell. they arrived via fedex, (78lbs each) each in a box big enough for a 5' tall person to fit inside in the fetal position. each box had a convenient built in pallet made of cardboard for easy transport with rabbit jacks or fork trucks. Each arrived in pristine condition.

I shipped them out to my branch offices, and drove to meet them. They arrived in OK condition at each site between Nashville and Pensacola. I installed them, and placed the old servers (which were nearly identical in size, shape, etc) in the boxes and instructed our people to ship them back to my office.

as they started arriving, each and every last one was destroyed. luckilly most servers were still intact, and only one actually came OUT of the box when they split open, causing damage. the rest was all cosmetic.

the best we could determine is during the flips our boxes went through as they were "rolled" around by one guy instead of being lifted by two it ended up on its back. then at some point as it was laying upside down, some brain surgeon saw the pallet bottom and thought to himself, "hey, look! Handles!" Unfortunately the box was not designed that way, and as soon as you jerk on the "pallet", the whole box bottom comes off (I demonstrated on a brand new one that I hadnt shipped out yet). If you were lucky enough to be attempting to fling the box to its next spot, the server would come spilling out all over the warehouse floor.

so brown, you are cheap, but im not a fan.

\and dont get me started on the a**raping Brown charges for ebay shipping vs corporate customers.
\\UPS/ebay/paypal wanted to charge me $120 to ship an 80lb box.
\\\I shipped it using my company's account and reimbursed them for the $25 they were charged as a corp account. BS!!!

Re:firsthand experience...

[santax]

Hmmmz, my experience with UPS is rather good. Last week I got a guitar I custom ordered some time ago. Not a dent in the box. Not a scratch on the guitar. Handled like pro's. Even a day earlier than planned! No, I was quite pleased with their performance. Of course the box was full with Fragile-stickers. No complaints from me. (Ps, this was in Europe so might not be applicable to this ask-slashdot question.

Re:firsthand experience...

[CoderBob]

The funny thing about those cardboard pallets: If it came FedEx Ground, the terminals have no rabbit jacks or fork trucks. They have flat carts, and conveyors, and people. That's it. Sometimes the difference is as simple as the mindset in your local FedEx Ground terminal compared to UPS, or vice versa.

Re:firsthand experience...

[WuphonsReach]

The funny thing about those cardboard pallets: If it came FedEx Ground, the terminals have no rabbit jacks or fork trucks. They have flat carts, and conveyors, and people. That's it. Sometimes the difference is as simple as the mindset in your local FedEx Ground terminal compared to UPS, or vice versa.

Yep, UPS doesn't have forklifts or rabbit jacks either.

Whenever I see a cardboard pallet arrive via a package delivery service, I know the shipper is being a cheap-skate instead of using a LTL company.

Re:ups / fedex push to much in there conveyor syst

[Anonymous Coward]

grammarians.

and you are trolling vocabulary pedants.

They could have done this with an iPhone app

[Anonymous Coward]

Just put it in Airplane Mode to shut off the radios, and they could've gotten several days of battery life. Results would have been just as accurate without all that custom instrumentation. Of course, temperature logging wouldn't have been possible, but everything else would've been.

Re:They could have done this with an iPhone app

[Gadget_Guy]

Just put it in Airplane Mode to shut off the radios, and they could've gotten several days of battery life.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. My iPhone has abysmal battery life, and even in airplane mode I'm not sure that it would be able to keep up the constant data logging for too long. Also, I just turned on airplane mode to test it, and it couldn't determine my location. I guess GPS requires the radio.

Re:They could have done this with an iPhone app

[MrQuacker]

For temperature they just needed to include a few of the freeze-warning stickers that places like Uline sell. They have several stickers that permanently change color if they are exposed to certain temperatures.

Re:They could have done this with an iPhone app

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the fuck would they want to do that?

Re:They could have done this with an iPhone app

[omglolbah]

Yes, but this was a neat little scam to get free hardware from NI, not Apple ;)

Hell, that is what projects are for at universities even. To get new toys without a budget :p

I love me some samples. *cuddles his big box of free loot*

Re:They could have done this with an iPhone app

[Bigjeff5]

All that custom insturmentation costs about $150-$200 if you build one yourself. They went through National Instruments, which ordinarily would have cost more (since someone else is doing it for you), but since NI gets free advertising they may have actually gotten it for free.

Who is building your custom data logging app for the iPhone, btw? That's gonna be one expensive project!

In other words, you chose an option that can do less and costs a hell of a lot more. Way to go.

Re:ups / fedex push to much in there conveyor syst

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who works in a UPS hub, I can tell you that is exactly why these packages get destroyed or lost. Very rarely is it actual human mishandling that causes package damage. It's usually the result of a hydraulic diverter arm trying to cram 40 or so packages into a belt designed for 20. On the upside, if your package gets there in one piece, it's going to get there very quickly!

expect a 5' drop

[Kyril]

Advice I've heard is that, especially during the holiday shipping rush, expect your package may take at least one 5' fall, as the fastest way to get a truck unpacked is to take a stack of boxes and spill it. We ship too much crap for them to have time to treat packages properly--and if we didn't ship so much, they'd still treat the packages quite briskly because we're too stingy to pay for proper handling.

Re:expect a 5' drop

[MachDelta]

As someone who used to work for UPS years ago, my rule of thumb for friends and family was "If you're not comfortable drop kicking your (small) package across the room, or pushing your (large) package down the stairs, it's not ready to ship."

Fragile

[CyberDragon777]

A "fragile" sticker? Really

Put something on it that demands more respect!

Like "Contents: nitroglycerin" or "Warning! Live bees!"

Re:Fragile

[Anonymous Coward]

I think then you'll get a visit to GITMO, free of charge, courtesy of DHS. Or at least get yourself listed on the "do not fly" list.

Re:Fragile

[jonwil]

Actually, it is perfectly legal to ship live bees.
Nitroglycerin on the other hand I dont know about.

Not Fedex

[dbIII]

They put a forklift fork through the front of my 1U server that was coming back from being repaired. After making a lot of fuss, sending photos etc they refunded the shipping costs to the guys that repaired it - leaving me with a forked server and no change to the original repair bill.

Re:Not Fedex

[fishbowl]

... and the value less deductible of the insured replacement cost of the server, right?

Re:Not Fedex

[dbIII]

The server was not replaced. Parts of the chassis were replaced locally. Fedex gave us nothing, the "insurance" was supposed to have paid by the shippers and we still had to pay the full bill and for the new chassis we bought locally. Legal action would be too costly and time consuming. The best solution was to stop using Fedex and also the server vendor - but we were going to drop the server vendor after they dropped their local support anyway. It's not worth shipping a server half way around the fucking world to be repaired when the parts all come from just about the same time zone.

Re:Not Fedex

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you select the shipping company? If not it is the problem of the guys who repaired it. You would have a good possibility with getting away with not paying the bill if you were willing to take the time/effort to be a jerk about it.

Re:Not Fedex

[dbIII]

That's why the people shipping it TO YOU are supposed to insure it.
Please learn to read before insulting people. The bit you failed to read was even in the text you quoted!

Simple

[PPH]

Put "Fragile, Glass" and "Biohazard" stickers on it.

Re:Simple

[MrQuacker]

Except all marking like that fall under the "special delivery" subset of rules, and that means extra handling fees.

Re:Simple

[Bigjeff5]

If you put "Biohazard" on it it won't fly.

Nice job.

Re:Simple

[noidentity]

As was covered a few days ago, even if it's radioactive, it still will get mishandled. Maybe some reverse-psychology is in order, and some "not fragile; handle without care" and the like might cause it to be shipped in pristine condition?

No statistical significance

[idealego]

They would need to do many more trips to gain any statistical significance.

Re:ups / fedex push to much in there conveyor syst

[Yvan256]

Thanks for the tip. I'm going to put superglue on four sides of my packages from now on. Your hydraulic diverter arms will add four bonus packages to my own.

Re:ups / fedex push to much in there conveyor syst

[Anonymous Coward]

I've also worked in a UPS hub, and we had plenty of employee caused package destruction. Not so much intentionally, but when you have a pickoff trying to push packages down a helical slide and its jammed, he doesn't have the time to climb down and break the jam. So his solution is to shove as hard as he can to make more room. Which is how a lot of cylindrical packages end up folded up and busted. Its also how the corner of one box can get smashed into the face of another box and crumple the face of that box.

Also good are the 30 foot falls from the belts to cement floors. Somewhat rare, but when any given position is dealing with 2 to 10 thousand pieces a shift.. even rare is a relatively common thing. Stuff gets backed up, stacked up, and then falls and is jacked up.

Add a ShockWatch

[Sycraft-fu]

They are impact sensors. They almost make tilt sensors, temperature sensors, and so on. They are extremely reliable little things that can be purchased at a variety of levels for when they go off. They are good enough Mythbusters likes to use them.

So in the event a package really is sensitive not only should you pad it (hey, mistakes happen) but stick a ShockWatch on it. The handlers ought to know well enough to be careful with it when there's an indicator in place. If not, well then when it gets where it is going and the ShockWatch is tripped the receiver documents that it is tripped, and denies delivery, and you then file for insurance. The people doing the shipping will soon enough be made to understand they are to treat those with respect unless they wish to find new jobs by the insurance division.

In general just padding is enough to do the trick. Some good rigid foam padding should be enough that things can survive almost anything. For the cases when things are more sensitive, then install meters. Every so often we get a package to work with monitors attached. They've never been tripped and the contents have always been in good condition.

Also for really sensitive stuff it is often good to go with a logistics company, rather than a normal shipper. They deal better with special instructions.

Re:Add a ShockWatch

[Bigjeff5]

Just to clarify, you should stick the ShockWatch on the outside of the package, preferably right next to the label or packing list. It does you no good if you have to open it up to find out it has experienced 6g's.

It's better than buying insurance, as it's super easy to tell who mishandled it immediately, so parcel companies tend to be more careful with them.

Re:Add a ShockWatch

[jonwil]

If you stick this to the outside of the package, add some sort of marking or so so that its obvious if the ShockWatch was removed and replaced by some shipping company manager so they dont have to cough up for insurance.

UPS, not so much.

[Dee Ann_1]

I call them United Package Smashers.

EVERYTHING I ever get shipped to me via UPS comes in with the box smashed and torn.
I'm amazed that anything survives the abuse they dish out on packages.
And this time of year they use those golf cart ATV thingies with trailers to deliver. All the packages are towed around for miles with no tarps over them to protect them from the weather or to keep something from bouncing out of the little trailers they tow behind. I do NOT approve.

I hate them.

USPS gets things to me in much better shape but their tracking system SUCKS. You can NOT track the progress of a package, they do not update until it's on your porch.
Worst tracking system of all.

Fed-ex is not bad, no real complaints with them. Decent tracking and stuff comes in in better shape than UPS.

DHL, I dont' like how they farm it out to some joker in a rental van. I don't trust that.

Re:UPS, not so much.

[MachDelta]

When I worked for them, we always called ourselves "Ur Package... Somewhere?"

In my experience...

[jcr]

I've never had a package lost or damaged by Fedex, Emery, or DHL. I wouldn't trust UPS with anything of any value whatsoever. The postal service has usually delivered my packages with only minor damage.

-jcr

Lost

[Anonymous Coward]

Damage is one thing -but what about complete loss? To me that's even worse, and should be included in any study. I know I've paid UPS to deliver a package by a specific day, had them claim 'weather' as the reason for not delivering it even though the weather between me and the target was bright and sunny and the delivery typically is done in a single day... only to have them STILL not deliver it for another week.... so essentially I've seen them claim Weather, when really they just misplaced it...

Some Interesting Musical Equip. Shipping Stories

[BlueStrat]

I design and hand-build vacuum tube guitar & bass amplifiers as a small side-business. I end up shipping them all over. There are a good number of others that do so as well. This is a very relevant /. topic for those like us.

Here's a link to a forum thread where several amp-building friends/acquaintances of mine share their horror stories, some with pictures of the wreckage.

http://www.weberorders.com/forum/index.php?topic=1781.0

It's not only the value of the hardware, it's as much or more about the huge number of man-hours plus the blood, sweat, and tears that go into hand-building (no PCBs...all hand-wired) and individually tweaking these amplifiers.

Trying to get compensated for the damages can be a nightmare. I can't even imagine what those who make & sell/ship musical instruments like hollow-body guitars and acoustic guitars, violins, etc must go through [shudders].

Strat

When I used to work in air freight...

[jimmyswimmy]

When I used to work in the freight industry, just about everything got kicked or dropped once. A "Fragile" sticker meant kick twice.

In all seriousness, materials need to be packed to survive fairly brutal treatment. The only things we were particularly careful with were live animals, dead people (they want to get shipped home) and radioactive material. We were careful with live animals because they make enough noise already. No way in hell did I want to drive a fork through a dead guy's coffin (bad hoojoo). And the same goes for the hazmat, just for different reasons.

So you would get better treatment if you put a bunch of hazmat stickers on your material, but the associated paperwork would make it quite costly to ship. Pretty hard to masquerade as any of the other things. Best bet - pack your stuff correctly, even at the cost of increased weight or size (which we also charged for as "dimensional weight") if you want it to get there in one piece. If it's worth something to you, spend the time and money to pack it right.

Re:When I used to work in air freight...

[shentino]

Here's an idea:

Start suing the crap out of them if you can prove they're deliberately mishandling your packages.

Fragile stickers inducing deliberate mishandling is tortious conduct at best, and criminal mischief at worst.

Real statistics

[hibiki_r]

Many large companies that operate warehouses could easily tell you what the real differences are between shipping companies when it comes to damages. In an example I know first hand, a switch from FedEx to UPS resulted in an increase of 0.7% on items returned due to damage in transit: Not that big of a difference, but enough to make sure that further UPS bids had to be noticeably lower than the FedEx bid to win: Packages damaged on delivery cost sales later.

Re:Some Interesting Musical Equip. Shipping Storie

[santax]

I would have read that link, but it's a you have to register to read this-site. I don't like those. I posted it in reply to another comment here already, but I actually got a hollowbody custom designed guitar here last week with UPS. Went perfect.

FedEx too...

[tivoKlr]

It's not exclusive to UPS, I watched the FedEx delivery girl drop my new head unit from waist height to the floor of the truck. Note, this was not from like the shelf to the floor, rather, she was holding it and the electronic scanner tool and just dropped the box right in front of me. It was as if she wanted to throw it off the truck through me, whilst propelling me off the step of the truck all in one motion, but this was the best she could get away with.

NBD, right? FFS.

OTOH, the UPS driver up here is the man, and treats my stuff right. USPS works but is slow as molasses.

I can tell you who gets my shipping dollars.

Re:FedEx too...

[baegucb]

My favorite story was watching delivery guys unload a truck with fragile IBM equipment equipped with wheels (disk drives back in the day). Their ramp was set against the bottom of the curb. They'd shove it out of the truck down the ramp, it'd hit the bottom of the curb, bounce, and then get lifted onto the sidewalk if it hadn't made it on its own. The IBM guy watching was almost in tears, but it wasn't his responsibility until it got into the building.

Re:FedEx too...

[shaitand]

I've lived in a lot of different locations and order most everything via amazon, ebay, and other online outlets. Tons of shipped items.

For the most part all the carriers do an equally bad job. It is a given the package is going to be abused if shipped and should be packed accordingly. Seriously if the contents are riding on a cushion of custom foam and air bubbles it won't matter if its dropped a couple feet.

As for speed. UPS ground might arrive overnight (if shipped in state) or it could take a full week. Fedex is not fast because fedex ground will never show up early even if it was shipped by your next door neighbor. Fedex is however consistent where UPS is all over the map. And if you are ordering an upgraded 2 day or overnight shipping UPS will often be late where fedex won't.

Re:FedEx too...

[HeronBlademaster]

USPS works but is slow as molasses.

I've had pretty good luck having USPS-mailed packages arrive fairly quickly, especially considering those packages are usually free shipping from Amazon.

On the other hand, the one time I paid extra to have a giant red "NON-MACHINABLE" stamp put on my envelope, it was returned to me a few days later (contents intact, fortunately) torn in half, in a plastic cover labelled "We Care". I even took a picture for posterity (addresses censored for obvious reasons). I made them send it again for free; as far as I'm aware, it arrived without incident.

Re:FedEx too...

[gmhowell]

I can tell you who gets my shipping dollars.

They one that has a driver who gives you a handy?

Re:FedEx too...

[fridaynightsmoke]

Agreed. If your package isn't packed well enough to withstand at least a 3ft drop onto concrete, and at least 20kg of pressure without breaking, you're doing it wrong. Obvious carelessness aside, there is NO carrier that will gently carry your package around wearing kid gloves, before putting it on the passenger seat of their van/truck with the seatbelt around it. All packages get tossed into that backs of trucks where they rattle around with 5 other packages on top of them, before being sorted by automated machines or dropped by forklifts. If you're sending something *that* fragile, cough the extra for a specialist carrier. Marking a package as 'fragile' doesn't work, largely because probably 75% of all packages are marked fragile, even when they're clearly not. Deopt workers quickly learn to ignore such markings, especially when the boss is cracking the whip shouting "faster! faster!".

Strangely enough, UPS is one of the better carriers here in the UK, possibly because as an outsider in the UK market they try harder than the incumbents. If you really want something broken, send it ParcelForce. They could crush a solid aluminium block :P

Re:FedEx too...

[Anonymous Coward]

So you refuse delivery on the grounds tha the goods were mishandled.

Re:FedEx too...

[AmiMoJo]

There are carriers who really will look after your package, they just cost 3-4x as much. Yamato in Japan is one of the best examples.

Having said that some countries seem to be a lot worse than otehrs. The US is one of the worst. Whenever I send anything over there I have to use a lot of extra packing material and a solid cardboard box. The UK and most of northern Europe (including France) are pretty good and I can get away with just a padded envelope or single wall light box. Spain and Italy are hit-and-miss though.

There is a better way, but if US postal worker's unions are anything like ours it will be hard to change working practices.

Re:FedEx too...

[BobMcD]

Agreed. If your package isn't packed well enough to withstand at least a 3ft drop onto concrete, and at least 20kg of pressure without breaking, you're doing it wrong.

And I'd have thought that you were doing it wrong by using standard units for distance and metric for pressure... /duck

Re:FedEx too...

[Dare nMc]

shipping guy I used to work with refused to mark anything "fragile" he figured it was considered a challenge to some shipping guys. It is the package most likely to give a good breaking sound if he throws it hard enough.

Re:FedEx too...

[fridaynightsmoke]

Needless unit mixing is a British speciality :P

Around here you can get a single road sign that tells you that the next town is 14 miles away, but the next exit is in 300 metres. If you take it, 1 1/2 miles down that road there is a 7.5 metric tonne weight limit, and a low bridge with 14ft 6in clearance... :p

Re:FedEx too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Needless unit mixing is a British speciality :P

Around here you can get a single road sign that tells you that the next town is 14 miles away, but the next exit is in 300 metres. If you take it, 1 1/2 miles down that road there is a 7.5 metric tonne weight limit, and a low bridge with 14ft 6in clearance... :p

Um, thats would be 300 yards, not 300m. No distances on our roads are marking in metric. Exits are given in either miles or yards (the 3 stripes, 2 stripes, 1 stripe markers for exits are yards)

US Postal Service

[JakFrost]

US Postal Service - Great Domestic & International Service for Me

For selling all my stuff on eBay and shipping sold items to Europe I've been using USPS for the last few years since they offered their online service and I've never had a problem. I must have shipped around 100-packages of weights between 1-40 lbs to many states and also to Brazil, UK, Hungary, Germany, Romania, and other countries without any issues or damaged parts. Their tracking is a bit slow, maybe a day behind the actual package, but it is good enough for me. Their shipping rates undermine UPS and FedEx every single time, sometimes by 50-100% of the rate. I package my stuff very well reusing the packaging materials from Newegg and Amazon packages that I use, including peanuts, air padded bags, the little and big plastic bubble wrap, and even newspapers. I usually use Priority but I've used Express occasionally when required. I'm happy with their service and the folks who bought my various eBay things were all happy with the shipping prices and delivery times. The online label printing and filling out of the customs forms makes my shipping very easy and my interaction at the post office is very short when I just hand the people the packages at the counter after I tell them it's already pre-paid. Sometimes I get the skip the waiting line. I've requested refunds from USPS for the shipping labels on packages that couldn't make the weight or size restrictions for international packages and I've always received the refund on my postage after about a 7-day waiting period. So I highly recommend them.

US Postal Service - Print Shipping Labels

UPS Story #1 - Dropped Server & Refused Insurance Coverage
My one single shipping story with UPS was when I sold a 80 lb Compaq ProLiant 5500 Dual Pentium Pro server to a buyer in California. He received it damaged after it was dropped on it's corner so hard that the entire frame of the server was scewed and many of the parts inside were cracked or popped and broke out of their sockets. The server was DOA. UPS inspected the server and the package at his location and determined that the package was improperly packed and the refused the insurance coverage on it. I went back to the professional shipping center which packaged the server and they apologized to me, told me that UPS has screwed them before like that by refusing insurance coverage, and they refunded my shipping costs and the cost of the old server from the eBay sale. I refunded all the money back to the buyer. That's my personal story with UPS.

UPS Story #2 - Friends Working As UPS Inspectors And Their Anecdotes

My friend was hired by a third-party company to inspect UPS packages for size and weight mislabeling and then charging the shippers additional costs. He worked their for a year or more and told me the stories that took place on the unloading floor. When the conveyors would jam up or stop working the packages would be pushed as hard as possible and kicked through the bottlenecks. Some conveyors ran high and some low to meet up and a bunch of packages would fall off the high conveyors from a good 10-foot height just to be thrown back onto the low conveyors. If any package on the floor broke open it would be looked through for valuable goods and ransacked. Around the holiday seasons when the package volume would increase and a lot of temporary workers were hired any packages from known popular company brands like Oakley or Rayban sunglasses would be routinely opened and ransacked, any electronic packages were also likely to be opened. The metal detectors used for employee entrance and exists for the shippers would be easily bypassed by a reach-around to friends, or by stashing the stuff and hiding it just to pick it up later or have one of the regular works with a truck pick them up. When heavy boxes with ammunition were dropped on the floor and bullets would spill out they would just tape them up and ship them off,

Re:US Postal Service

[nickb64]

The other nice thing about the Postal Service is that you may even be able to have your carrier pick up what you're shipping out and take it back to the office and get it sent out, as well as the fact that if you have the item all ready to go, you can use an APC machine in the lobby to print out the postage sticker and use your ATM or credit card to pay for the shipping right there, then drop it in the machine's bay and it will be picked up and sent out by the employees(not the best option for fragile things due to the dropping involved, for that it is best to hand it to a clerk at the counter)

Re:US Postal Service

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans, if you're shipping to a private address in Europe, please please use the USPS, or at least provide an option so your customers can chose USPS if they wish. The corresponding European delivery services, the various post offices, tend to actually deliver the goods. In my experience, UPS, Fedex, et al, invariably fail to do so, so your customer has to spend half a day going to a wharehouse in the middle of nowhere to pick up the package. This has happened to me in the UK, Ireland, Belgium & France. I avoid buying physical goods from the US because there's a high risk I'll lose half a day's income to delivery companies that don't deliver.

Re:US Postal Service

[What the Frag]

USPS... the other way around is actually terrible.

I sometimes ship from Germany to US by DHL. They deliver it to USPS. The packages are transported within 2-3 days to the US. After that happens, the tracking won't update it's status anymore and nobody knows where the package is. It usually takes them between 7-30 days to deliver a package.

UPS and Fedex are much faster.

Re:US Postal Service

[Smauler]

Their shipping rates undermine UPS and FedEx every single time, sometimes by 50-100% of the rate.

So sometimes they deliver for free then?

Re:US Postal Service

[greed]

Even just to Canada. Dealing with imports via courier companies is a pain in the backside.

For starters, I can't have them delivered to the office because the mailroom won't be able to pay any import duties which may be owing. (If I know in advance, I can leave a cheque... but you don't find out what the duties are until they actually try to deliver.)

Making it worse, your company can set up a "special" broker for at least UPS, which can cost much, much more than UPS's already-overpriced brokerage service. (You never want UPS Economy or Ground for international; the extra cost for Express or Expedited is much lower than the brokerage fee for Economy/Ground.)

And, like in Europe, the Post Office is in everyone's neighbourhood. The couriers are not.

Re:Some Interesting Musical Equip. Shipping Storie

[BlueStrat]

I would have read that link, but it's a you have to register to read this-site. I don't like those. I posted it in reply to another comment here already, but I actually got a hollowbody custom designed guitar here last week with UPS. Went perfect.

Oops, sorry about the registration-required link...I completely forgot. However, I can tell you absolutely that registration is safe with this site. You won't receive spam, etc. It's worth registering if you have any interest at all in the workings of the equipment you play through.

If you enjoy playing through vacuum tube amps and want to understand a little more and/or do a little tweaking/modding or even try an amp or effects project, it's a great resource. The amp techs and others that post there are *extremely* knowledgeable, friendly, and helpful. It's one of the best amp-builder's forums on the 'net, IMHO.

Glad to hear your guitar arrived in good shape. I've had mixed results.

Rock on!

Strat

UPS stands for Unrealiable Parcel Service

[codeguy007]

I use to work for a Computer Manufacturer and UPS was by far the worst of the ones we used. DHL and Fedex were usually good but UPS would mess stuff up all the time. I worked for a Canadian company and I have been told that UPS is better in the States than they are in Canada but we had shipments to states messed up too.

Why I hate UPS

[Anonymous Coward]

For many years, UPS has thrown/dropped my packages on my enclosed porch. I hear them hit the ground. It doesn't matter how they are marked, or if they are insured for thousands of dollars. Fed Ex carefully sets them on the porch. I don't even hear it.

I tried ordering a hard drive from Monarch, but they let the drives flop around in the box without padding. After UPS dropped it off, I returned it without even trying to power it up. Newegg packages appropriately.

Just imagine if Apple did this...

[jcr]

They ship tens of millions of devices with accelerometers and gyros. If they just ran a tool to log those readings without turning on the display or anything else but the CPU and the sensors, they could probably get several days' worth of data per unit, enough to cover the time from leaving the factory to arriving at the customer's address.

-jcr

They didn't test HDS?

[kimvette]

They didn't test HDS?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2sObM9p9mQ

My experience in the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in the USA and have had a few hundred items shipped to me over the past 8 years. USPS is by FAR the best. NO contents shipped by USPS have ever been even slightly damaged; only 1 box was dented.

EVERY UPS and Fedex shipped box has been damaged, crushed, torn, etc., and have had to do many damage claims on the contents. DHL no better.

USPS- 100% has my vote!!

Are we really surprised by this?

[rogerdugans]

Like many others, in my youth I spent a short time working at one of the companies under discussion.
Care was taken- just not that much care, really.

And this was not just a few people that were reprobates or worse than the others, it was required by the speed work was done at and the amount of time allowed for loading/unloading a truck.

The reality is this: with the volume of packages and speed of delivery there WILL be damage.
More during busy times than the slack ones.

And as long as people want FAST delivery at LOW prices, it will continue.
That being said, there are a few tricks: packages with insurance and tracking DO get treated better.
Packages that say FRAGILE and do NOT have insurance and tracking labels WILL be treated worse than normal, eventually, somewhere.

I would say that the g-meter readings were better than I expected considering the number of times I watched trucks get loaded by literally throwing packages 20, 30 even 40 feet while a truck was being loaded.

Royal Caribbean

[Anonymous Coward]

The housekeeping chicks on Royal Caribbean were pretty nice to my package. Screw UPS, Fedex and the rest!

Wrong question!

[kurokame]

It's not a matter of comparing companies. The point of failure is almost always the distribution center or the delivery driver. Because of this, the "best company" answer will vary by city and by address.

The language barrier, obviously.

[ibsteve2u]

One disheartening result was that our package received more abuse when marked "Fragile" or "This Side Up."

I'm sure that the package would be handled much more carefully if you stamped "Fragile" and "This Side Up" on it in Arabic.

Re:The language barrier, obviously.

[PremiumCarrion]

Especially if you're shipping clocks.

Amazon Prime shipping

[KingAlanI]

Now that you mention it, I recall that my Amazon Prime shipments haven't come marked as shipped by a big name.
Never lost anything or got it late or damaged, and Amazon seems to pack them sturdily.
Granted, I've only gotten small things like CDs.

Not *entirely* sure, but USPS definitely ... UPS

[KingAlanI]

I've experienced a lot of shaky UPS behavior, but that's what's been used for my big and heavy incoming shipments (that vendor just switched to FedEx [I wonder why?], but I haven't ordered from them since then, and otherwise don't have much experience with FedEx either)
USPS seems to do quite alright with the smaller packages (I both send and receive a lot). Don't have much experience with sending large stuff via USPS, but the one time I recall doing so, the clerks were serious about making sure I used boxes that were sturdy enough.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=UPS
Look down the alphabetical order a bit and read those definitions - LOL

18000 mAh powered datalogger for only 3 days?!

[noidentity]

The device they created was capable of measuring acceleration, orientation and temperature. But the task wasn't a slam-dunk. "Having a processor constantly awake and writing to an SD card takes a toll on a battery," Brettle says. "But by modifying our LabVIEW code, we were able to put the processor to sleep and selectively write to the SD card. That got us 74 hours of battery life." That's enough juice to gather data from a three-day trip. We were in business.

This thing was powered by an Energizer Energi To Go XP18000, which has an 18000 mAh capacity, and could only run for a little over three days?! What's happened to embedded designers? Maybe it was just a constraint of having to use an evaluation board, which isn't made for low-power battery operation.

Decently-written article, BTW. Usually magazines have articles full of grade-school humor, because the "journalist" can't keep serious for more than a couple of sentences at a time.

Re:18000 mAh powered datalogger for only 3 days?!

[timbos]

It had to run LabView

germany is great for packet delivery

[Anonymous Coward]

slightly offtopic:
I'm glad to live in germany, hermespaketshop.de offers a good price, a lot of pickup stations and I never even once received a package from them that even had the hint of a dent.

Inland delivery - UPS opened my parcel!

[Anonymous Coward]

I read all those posts about damage i.e. lack of respect for your property, but in my case, I received a UPS parcel (a pair of ladies boots) with a massive tear at the bottom and a piece of tape slapped over it. I thought it was illegal to open people's mail but was told to give up hope on suing them because:
- my parcel arrived
- content was not damaged

So a tear (even though big enough to remove & check what i bought) would not count towards a violation of privacy. This just sucks. UPS you suck and I'm glad Aldo dumped your shitty service for another shitty company: Royal Mail.

Re:Inland delivery - UPS opened my parcel!

[ledow]

It is illegal to deliberately read another's mail. But a tear doesn't mean it was human-induced, or even deliberately done. Holding a box by the only bit of tape / corner of cardboard that you can grab in between two knuckles while holding two others in your hands will cause heavy boxes to tear and rip and shred and that's without even thinking of the numerous journeys by boat, rail, plane, car, bike and human they have gone on before they get to you.

And in some cases, they can open the mail - for instance if the addressee isn't clear (and then they often post you back the opened envelope in another (sealed) envelope once they can read the address from the top of the letter inside, or if the parcel is suspicious, and customs routinely open international mail and can do just about anything they like to it in order to make sure it's genuine (even read the letters inside and check with those people that they know you, if it hints of criminal activity).

If your parcel was *genuinely* opened then the only problems are breach of privacy within the mail system (so you would have to PROVE in a court of law that the action was deliberate and to what end they wanted to see your boots), or if something is damaged / stolen - in which case it's much easier to prove and you SHOULD have followed it through to a court of law and/or insurance claim. But because there was a tear in the box that they at least tried to repair, doesn't mean it was done deliberately.

I've had that happen with any number of carriers - most prominently Royal Mail - but never any one more than another, and never to the extent that I get suspicious they might be opening my parcels deliberately. I don't think I've had anything "lost in the mail" that I sent / expected in the 15 years I've been posting items (including several thousand items on eBay back and forth as buyer / seller). Tell a lie - I think that, once, the water-logged, blurry, soggy, remains of an envelope that arrived from a flooded post-office with an apology and a special delivery to forward it on as best they could was missing a return envelope for the junk mail inside.

Paranoid much?

Re:Inland delivery - UPS opened my parcel!

[Anonymous Coward]

It was an inland delivery dummy, the parcel came from a high-street store. Don't you read before jumping to protect a company that has let down so many Slashdoters? A STFU would be appropriate in ur case.

The packaging was black solid plastic. You would need a sharp object to create a tear like the one I saw. I wouldn't have paid much attention if:
1) the parcel hadn't arrived late
2) the driver didn't look like a dodgy geezer
3) the tear was small (i.e. something that happened during transit... and their armored van)

And no I don't like the idea that someone opened my parcel and checked what was inside. Maybe international parcels but not inland ones. And yes, Royal Mail IS another shitty company. Everybody in the UK knows that du-m-b-a-s-s.

Debian definitely

[jlar]

Debian is clearly the company kindest to my packages although they break them once in a while.

Re:Debian definitely

[VGPowerlord]

Debian is clearly the company kindest to my packages although they break them once in a while.

I've found that Debian's stable service tends to break packages less, but it takes packages a very long time to arrive with said service.

Ubuntu is quite quick, but sometimes packages don't end up quite how you expect.

And don't get me started on Red Hat (although, tbh I haven't used Red Hat since RHEL/CentOS/Fedora came into existence).

Well duh

[SmallFurryCreature]

You get what you pay for. At sorting centers the speed is breakneck. Do you REALLY think "this side up" CAN even be respected if not only there are a dozen packages coming down your chute, but the sorting system itself already thumbles them every which way regardless of human handling?

In the Netherlands there is currently a struggle going on because the old postal service had to go commercial and the market was broken open. Results is dat companies like "selektvracht" came in and cherry picked the contracts with low low offers (they don't deliver in rural areas or pick up mail from mail boxes) employing straight from the imigration desk. The official language is "Engrish" with the bulk of workers from whatever boat docked most recent with a load of refugees. Gosh and they just don't seem to care about how your 2000 euro mac gets handled... wonder why.

If you pay peanuts, you get monkey's. And yet if you read the posts near the top you see a couple of losers whining that there cheap cheap package company doesn't employ people who care about their job.

They don't get that people DO care about their job. Just that what is good for your job in these companies isn't good for the customer. I did it ages ago for a while. I actually went around picking up all the busted packages to process them and was told "don't do that, you are paid to look after the system". Eventually they just got thrown out. It is COMPANY policy to care about quantity, not quality.

So stop blaming the monkeys. They do not try to break packages but they get paid for pushing as many as possible, and if some break. Though shit. Volume volume volume.

But hey, you wanted to save a buck on the shipping rate.

Psychological field test

[SpaghettiPattern]

Psychological field test:

• Spread an abundance of toys into an otherwise empty room.
• Introduce a kid into the room.
• Tell the kid he can play with any toy EXCEPT the one you point out.
• Leave the room.
• Observe.
• Be disappointed by the result.
• Repeat with different kids until utterly appalled by humanity.

Alternative test:

• Use fruits instead of toys.
• Use a woman instead of a kid.
• Exclude the apple.
• Let humanity redeem itself through ridiculous penitence.

The moral: Actively NOT doing something primarily needs you to contemplate performing the actual task. And then you have to suffer the abstinence.

Re:Psychological field test

[ledow]

Quick! Don't think of a purple rhino!

Re:Psychological field test

[Reziac]

Personally, I prefer to not think of the white hippopotamus while changing the boiling water into gold.

===

[Side effect: by the time I got done typing this, I'd forgotten what it was you told us not to think about, and had to reread your post. *sigh*]

Re:Psychological field test

[neminem]

Fun fact: to anyone who knows about The Game, any request to not think about [pretty much anything at all] will be converted into a request to not think about the game. I just lost.

Needs proving.

[Anonymous Coward]

You need statistics to back this up. Anadotical stories are no good.

FedEx

[Targon]

Over the past ten years, I have found that FedEx delivers packages that are in the best overall condition compared to the competition. For most packages, we don't worry as much about shifting as much as obvious signs of abuse in transit, and that is a real key. If you send something that is in a box in PERFECT condition, meaning good packaging, solid edges(has never been crushed or abused), and you then wrap it and send it, how many packages sent arrive in reasonable condition?

Now, UPS is the worst about this based on my location here on the east end of Long Island, NY. FedEx on the other hand delivers packages that are as good as most things you buy retail, with no abuse evident. Isn't that what people want, to order something, or ship something, and have it get delivered in GOOD condition?

I have personally shipped items using UPS from California to this area before flying here myself, and was shocked at how bad the boxes themselves looked, even though 8 out of 14 were labeled fragile and had insurance. And yes, the contents were severely damaged in transit. As a result, I have found it is better to pay extra to ship FedEx when possible than to go UPS. I HATE UPS at this point because their organization cares nothing about the customer and you can complain over and over and over again without any results.

The USPS is ok, but it is hit or miss when it comes to how well your packages will be delivered. The system in the northeast USA is far better than it is in the San Francisco Bay area when it comes to getting anything delivered, so it is really hit or miss for handling based on where in the country you are.

People who want to test the quality of service need to take location into account, and the article clearly did not do this. Those living in Kansas may experience a very different experience than those living in the suburbs of New York or Boston.

FedEx

[Mr. Munshun]

A few years ago, I purchased a high-end Cisco switch. The company used FedEx to ship it. When it arrived, the box looked like an accordion, and it rattled. When I opened the box, the sides of the switch were broken into many pieces. I called to file a damage claim and asked if Jim Carey was delivering that day.

supposedly?

[jDeepbeep]

after the 4000th 50lb supposedly fragile package it's REALLY hard to give a flying

Supposedly fragile? I stopped reading right there. Screw you. If I write fragile on a package, it is fragile. It's not for you to decide.

Re:supposedly?

[Anonymous Coward]

75% of packages shipped have "fragile" written on them. Fragile relative to what?

Re:supposedly?

[dwinks616]

Precisely. I could put a solid brick of steel in a box and label it fragile. Sure, you take said brick and slam it into something else solid at a million miles an hour, I'm pretty sure you'll "break" it. It's freight shipping. Assume your package will be dropped from a height of 6ft, possibly repeatedly, and package your goods to compensate. There's a reason why whenever I order something off NewEgg, it comes in its original package (which is designed for shipping, as is) which is then stuffed inside another box with 12+ inches of packing peanuts on all sides, and the outer box is packed to the brim with peanuts so settling and shifting isn't possible.

Outsourced Shipping UPS / Overpriced Brokerage

[foxalopex]

I honestly think the problem with UPS is that it out-sources its deliveries to third party shipping companies versus doing the actual deliveries with their own fully paid staff. I recall in my area, they consistently had some of the worst service and most likely to be damaged packages. I still remember the time where their third party delivery company attempted delivery at 2am in the morning according to the UPS website! Truth was they didn't bother and just scratched in some random time to look as if they had made first attempt. Too bad whoever did it didn't know the difference between am and pm! Eventually Purolator in my area took over the thrid party shipping for UPS and things have been better than the literally back of a warehouse trucking company. Although I suspect Purolator handles their own packages with higher priority than UPS.

This is why UPS's results tend to be unpredictable. It depends on which third party company UPS hired which can range from decent to horrific. I find that is probably the reason why results vary.

If you're in Canada, you're also likely to have discovered that UPS has the worst brokerage fee of any shipping company as well which is why if possible I try to avoid them as much as possible. I mean when you charge $20 brokerage for paying $5 of taxes at the border it makes you wonder why UPS!?

In Canada the postal equivalent is CanadaPost and I've always found their service to be great. Their post offices also tend to close late which makes it easy to grab a parcel after work. I imagine the USPS is very similar.

more data

[scharkalvin]

It might be interresting to repeat the experiment with a GPS logger as well. I've always wondered just how they route my package and how long it really sits at a depot before being moved on. You would need a very sensitive GPS for this to work as the package will be indoors most of the time and getting a GPS fix inside a moving vechile would depend on the package being near a window or a door.

Re:more data

[jackl420]

Did you know that you can "track" most packages on line and get the information you seek without putting a GPS in the package? There are even widgets and apps that do this (Delivery Status by Junecloud.com). The tracking number for UPS is the one near the bar code label that starts with "1Z...". Almost all shipments use the tracking number now.

Greyhound

[Anonymous Coward]

Greyhound bus will also ship packages as freight. They tend to be very gentle as the packages don't go through large sorting centers, but they do sometimes loose stuff altogether. Pick your poison I guess...

OnTrac

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had nothing but good experience with OnTrac deliveries of Amazon orders. I don't see any reason why they would be less careful or reliable, as they don't have a huge infrastructure to hide behind if something is botched.

It is kind of amusing to see a guy pull up in a beat-up sedan with boxes piled up in the back seat.

Batteries + Microprocessor + heat + RFI

[smurd]

Good job TSA!

Wired Magazine used to print the most entertaining package they received in the mail.
I wouldn't want to try that now.

Depends on the driver

[curado]

Back in 2003 when LCD monitors were still priced fixed (I think I was paying $250/ea?) and Newegg was still shipping primarily with Fedex, I had 6 units delivered directly to my house. They were destined for the office. Each one received a LOUD 8' drop from the truck onto my driveway (as witnessed through a raised miniblind.) A minute later I opened the door to sign. An awkward moment... I think my glare said enough. I never reported the guy. Everything works to this day (less two or three power supplies). No shipping claim was required much to my surprise. Two of the monitors have slight artifacts but were functional enough that Newegg would have argued any return. The foam packing apparently does make a difference. As far as exceeding weight capacity on a single walled box? Any UPS battery ordered through Newegg up until about a year ago was being shipped in its bare carton. I would seldom get one in tact, but usually all the pieces would be in there. A lot of the ones on store shelves don't look much better.

Undamaged package

[jbeaupre]

Nearly 30 years ago I stumbled on a way to ship items without any damage happening. I needed to bring back two boxes of stuff from my grandparents. I didn't look to closely at the two boxes, but the airport sure did. "Does this box really have sulfuric acid?" Huh? Oh, that's just the box. Don't worry. It was left over from treating the swimming pool.

At baggage at my destination, the sulfuric acid box was pristine. Not a scratch, dent, or tear. The corners were perfect. The regular box was beat to hell and barely holding together.

I doubt you could even use a left over pool chemical box anymore.

None of them!

[Anomalyx]

USPS - Package is always smashed.

UPS - Likes to be late, or decide they don't feel like delivering and make me drive out to the local distribution center if I want my package. Also found once a package was opened, had things removed, and was taped shut again. Also, refuses to 'return to sender' or to allow me to refuse accepting shipment.

FEDEX - a deliveryman once signed for and kept a package being delivered to me. It was in an Alienware box, but what was in the box wasn't a computer - it was an Alienware backpack with a laptop slot to hold the laptop that arrived a few days earlier. Package was eventually recovered and given to me, though.

Is not just parcel carriers...

[crovira]

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Re:ups / fedex push to much in there conveyor syst

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone really been far as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

My UPS story

[bdparsley]

For the most part, I've never had issues with ups, fedex or usps when it comes to packages The worst was dealing with UPS my mother shipped a hand made, wooden rocking horse from NC to California for my neices birthday. Issue 1: It arrived 2 days late. Which we only found out by finally tracking the package down to the local depot, where the claimed it was too large for delivery. That's after it had traveled from NC to California just fine, and UPS had said nothing about it being too large at any point in the process. The entire time the tracking said "out for delivery" Issue 2: Package was finally delivered after arguing with the depot. Open the package to find splinters of a crushed horses head and neck. And this wasn't a fragile horse. It was made from 8/4 lumber. Issue 3: Called UPS (furious) to make an insurance claim. Easy enough on the insurance and shipping refund, but they refused to refund the packaging. Except the packaging was done by a local UPS store (which charged $50 for the service). UPS refused to pay, the local UPS store refused. Finally got them to pay out for that as well. The package was in UPS hands from the time it was packaged to the time it was delivered, and they failed round trip. Pretty upsetting to see that after flying cross country to be there for her birthday. The replacement was sent fedex, and arrived without a single scratch or issue.

There's a reason I call them Oops trucks

[CeruleanDragon]

Two UPS anecdotes:

1) Years ago I was hanging out at my favorite speedshop with my friends (the owners), and a UPS truck pulled up with varied car parts. One of them was an aftermarket fiberglass wing. The package (and subsequently the wing itself) had a round divet in it that looked very much like someone had stored it under a grand piano leg. And then stomped up and down on the piano. Of course the shop owners filed the "do not accept due to damage" form and the driver took it away.

2) I ordered a 22" Viewsonic P220F CRT monitor a while ago, back when they were "top of the line". When the UPS driver backed into my driveway and slid the box back to me, I eagerly went to grab it.... and noticed it was missing a corner. The box was missing an entire corner plus the styrofoam packing, a chunk about as big as a soccerball. The monitor itself was wrapped in plastic, but the corner was sticking out, and the screen itself in that corner was scratched several times. The driver looked at me and said, "Not going to accept it due to, I'm guessing?" Heh, yeah, no, didn't take it. Signed the electronic pad and he took it away. Another showed up a week later, this one the box still looked a little worn, but not like it had been dropped and clipped a shelf on the way down, and the monitor inside was new.

I've never had any issues with FedEx, DHL, or USPS, but those are just my anecdotes. Of the UPS and FedEx places I go to, the FedEx people are generally friendlier (a lot friendlier) but again, that's just my personal experiences with the two.

A better question

[dacaldar]

Which shipping company gives you the least annoying option when they (in their infinite wisdom) are surprised when you aren't home to sign for your package DURING THE WORK DAY!!! When I lived in Markham, Ontario (high-tech centre just outside of Toronto), it was almost an hour drive one-way through typically slow traffic to get down to the UPS distribution centre, which was your only option if you weren't going to take days off of work hoping to catch the delivery guy when they happened to arrive. I think FedEx was almost as bad, except that after phoning to express my displeasure, I found out that through a simple phone request, they can transfer the item to a satellite office in nearby Richmond Hill. That option isn't mentioned on the door hanger they leave behind when you (gasp!) aren't home at 2pm. They call themselves a delivery company, and then make you go pick it up in a horrible location. Nice. Meanwhile, good old Canada Post can deliver almost as fast, cheaper, and they leave it at the drug store a few streets over, or the nearest post office.

UPS works as expected

[sChatwin]

I ship porcelain vases and pottery regularly. About 100 packages a year (all high value > $1000) and get 1 or 2 breakage claims a year. I double box (external is double wall), use lots of peanuts, airbags, egg carton Yes, UPS ground insurance claims are automatically denied 1st time round, but they pay up eventually. Ground gets more breakages that air (ground is handled more often) and 'fragile' labels are not worth anything. A few international shipments each year get sent FedEx 'cos they handle the export paperwork better! Get the UPS guy out to train you how to pack fragile stuff - it's worth the embarrassment. Overall the results from this test are exactly what I'd expect.

GUS

[aidan.fairbanks]

When I worked briefly for Great Universal Stores in the UK in their distribution point (lots of parcels to be put into one of twenty lorry containers), I was advised by one of the older employees that "Fragile" meant "Throw it harder".

Fitting inside in the fetal position

[pimproot]

These posts have put an end to my dream of shipping myself across the country.

FEDEX (to me) is the best

[ps2os2]

Hands down (in the US) is FEDEX. I have at least 3-4 packages delivered weekly to my home. FEDEX has never delivered anything broken or mishandled. UPS & USPS are down on the later USPS is the worst and the slowest. Example (UPS) I order memory or whatever from a dealer in the suburbs and it is here the next day (without special handling). With the USPS first class envelope takes 3-4 days to get here from the suburbs.
I will only mention FEDEX in this context. I ordered an IPAD and I tracked the shipment and it went 4 or 5 places in SE Asia before it hit the US and then one bounce it came.
FEDEX is pretty good in the US. I had a computer monitor sent to me from CA and it arived the next day again no next day service was requested. The damn thing weighed 70 pounds.