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

When I worked for UPS

[__aahmnf219]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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: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: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.

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: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.

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: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.

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: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: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: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.