I mentioned in another post that I was expecting a package and got a solicitor instead. So, now on to the story of that package. I was at my computer at around 8:00 and an email came in saying, sorry we missed you. Your package requires a signature and you weren’t home. Bull. Shit. I’ve been here all night. I went to the front door and there was no post-it saying they had been there. There was no doorbell ring (and I know it works because, solicitor dude).
I’m buying a box of wire from Amazon. No shipping notification from either Amazon or UPS said the delivery would require a signature. Why would a box of speaker wire require an adult signature, anyway? I think someone ran late and decided to go home for the night. I’m sure their tracking software doesn’t have an option for “Don’t feel like it”, so the driver flagged it as needing signed and no one home. All done for the day!
Some part of me is annoyed by this, but another part of me isn’t. It’s not like I needed that wire tonight. But what if it was something I needed right away? And this driver, he’s lying. I’m not sure what sort of repercussions he could face if I should call him out on it. He’s human, he’s a lazy American, just like the rest of us, he wants to go home after probably a 12-hr day. And I can’t fault a person for not working hard at their job. I’m a lot of things, but not a hypocrite.
Here’s how that one progressed.
I went to UPS’s site and changed the delivery to go to my nearby UPS Store. I chose this for a couple of reasons. If they were correct about the delivery needing a signature, I didn’t want to miss out again. If they were lying about needing a signature, I wanted a person to confront about it. I submitted the change and stewed about the situation for the night.
I had plenty of time to stew. The missed delivery happened on Tuesday. I got no notifications and the tracking showed no movement for the rest of the week. The next Monday, I stopped by the UPS service center and asked if they could find my package. The manager there took my phone number and said he’d call me with an update. I told him, “I don’t care if it comes to the house, the UPS Store, or here. I’ll get it.” Oh, and I did ask about the signature required. He said that the package probably came back and was scanned incorrectly. So I guess, there is no commitment to deliver everything on the truck for the day. Huh.
I did get a call later from the UPS manager who said the package could not be found and I would need to call the corporate office and “open an investigation”. So I call their number and tell them I need to “open an investigation”. The operator said I’d be transferred to the right department. I ended up getting a voice menu of options that were way above my head, full of international shipper industry terms. I heard “lost” in one of the options and chose that. The person that answered, after hearing the full story, and probably expecting to be talking to a fellow UPS employee, said that Amazon has to initiate the claim, not me. Ugh, fine.
So by this time, I could have re-ordered the speaker wire 3 times over and gotten it delivered. An “investigation” doesn’t sound like it’s going to get me my package anytime soon, so I place a new order on Amazon for the same thing. Then I research my options for filing a claim for the old order. The option I was steered toward was contacting the shipper to file a claim. Great. No one wants to take responsibility here. Eventually I found Amazon’s general chat help link and got a resolution. They refunded my money. But I wasn’t all that happy, because UPS should be paying for this, not Amazon. I apologized that they were being hurt for this, and actually, it’s not them being hurt, it’s the small business seller on Amazon being hurt, because Amazon just won’t give them the money they refunded back to me. It’s a shitty resolution.
I’d already received the replacement and finished my project when, two weeks later, I get an email. My package is ready to pick up at the UPS Store. I jump back on Amazon’s help chat and ask if I should just refuse the delivery and have it sent back to them. The CSR says, the refund has already been issued, take the package as a gift from Amazon.
On one level, I get it. The amount of money already spent on the package to ship it, then again to return it would be a waste of time and money, resulting in a net loss. But that’s Amazon’s loss. Or is it? The seller still won’t see any money for the product lost. UPS is getting off the hook and if I returned it, would be making more money of their fuckup.
But really, we’re talking about a $10 purchase here. This is nothing to a large business. But multiply that by however many fuckups UPS can make, and it could be terrible for some smaller businesses along the way.
In the end, it didn’t matter. I got an email from Amazon saying, “give us our shit back or you’re going to be charged for it.”
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