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

[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 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.

When I worked for UPS

[__aahmnf219]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite tracking log entry:
Delayed- train derailment.

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.

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.

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.

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:ups / fedex push to much in there conveyor syst

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. My brain hurts.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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: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.

Simple

[PPH]

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

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: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?

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

[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:In a just world...

[nospam007]

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

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.

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:In a just world...

[Eskarel]

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