Saturday, January 28, 2012

Why FedEx Can Bite Me


I pre-ordered a TRON-styled PS3 controller from PDP in December for a mid-January release. “Super Saver” shipping was available for a very pleasant $2.99, so I chose that. The carrier wasn’t specified, but given the low price, I assumed it would be USPS. I used my home address for the destination, envisioning finding a funky new vidya game controller in my mailbox one day the next month. Yay, happy times!

Here, I’ll make an aside that appears unrelated, but will be relevant later. Later in December, I was to receive an Express envelope via FedEx. It was addressed to my house, but I was out of town when it arrived.  Somehow, the driver knew this and delivered it to my office instead. Helpful, yet simultaneously a bit creepy.

I received a shipping notice for the controller on 1/20, surprisingly revealing that the package was coming via FedEx. OK, fine, I guess. Whatever. (Though I did flash briefly back to Vangelus’s recent painful FedEx story. “Ah, that was just a fluke,” I mused. “And hey, that was in CANADA. It probably happened because they use moose and beavers to deliver packages up there.”)

On 1/25, I came home from work to find a FedEx tag on my door, left at 10:24AM. “No big deal,” I thought, “I’ll just sign the tag, leave it on the door, and they’ll leave the package on the porch tomorrow.” But wait! The tag showed that an IN-PERSON signature was required. I couldn’t just leave it on the door. What? I'd never seen that for a previous shipment.

The tag listed a “Hold at FedEx Location” option, which I explored on their website. The site listed several facilities capable of that feature, the nearest of which is 22 miles away. It’s in another town, one I visit every two or three weeks, but I wasn’t planning on going there for the next several days. Therefore, it was time to call them.

Naturally, it took several tries to get through the voice recognition system to an actual person. It didn’t recognize anything related to “problem”. (Because “Who could ever have a problem with our service???”, I guess.) Once I reached a rep, I explained the situation, and said that no one would be home in the morning on weekdays. Given, y’know, that people have jobs. I asked if the delivery could be changed to my office, a mere 2.3 miles away. The rep replied, “Sure!”

“Great!”

“There will be an extra charge of $11 for that.”

Bwa? “$11?”

“Yes. But you don’t have to pay it. It will be charged to the shipper.”

I saw no way PDP would go for that noise, especially since that’s $8 more than I paid them for shipping in the first place. So I asked if the package could be delivered to my house in the afternoon, say, after 1:00. The rep told me, essentially, “We’ll get a message to the driver, but no promises.”

On 1/26, a tag was once again left on my door, this time at 11:45AM. (That’s CLOSE to afternoon, FedEx, but no banana.) Sigh. I resigned myself to a 22-mile drive to pick up my controller, and went back to the website to set it up. However, after entering the tracking number and selecting the “Hold” option, the site offered only one location: 57 miles away, in a town I never visit. No way, Jose.

I called FedEx and went through the whole rigmarole again. This time, the rep ASSURED me that she was arranging for the driver to deliver the package the next day, between 1:00 and 3:00 PM. (The wife would be home then.) She said this was being noted in their system so that other reps and the driver could see it. She even took my cell number, saying the driver would call me “to meet somewhere” if the delivery couldn’t happen during those hours. I asked if there would be a surcharge for that.

“No.”

“If the driver can do that, why would you charge the shipper $11 to change the delivery address to my office?”

I received the telephone equivalent of a shrug. Despite that, I was becoming hopeful that I’d actually receive my shiny new gewgaw the next day.

Boy, that was stupid.

At around 11:00 AM on 1/27, I checked the tracking out of morbid curiosity. Sure enough, another “delivery exception” at 9:53 AM. That’s right: the driver had come to my home even earlier than the first two days. At that point, I was – understandably, I feel – rather peeved. In addition, I became worried that FedEx would decide to send the package back to PDP, given that they’d made three delivery attempts. (As Vangelus knows, delivery attempts are a limited resource that must be used sparingly!)

I called FedEx… again. After I laid out the spiel once more, rep #3 told me that there were no notes about an afternoon delivery request in the system. %#@*&$. I expressed my disappointment at their handling of this whole situation, and asked if they would attempt delivery again. The rep apologized in that hackneyed canned-rep-apology way, and said delivery would be reattempted on Monday, 1/30. (Luckily, that would actually work, as I’m not scheduled to be in the office 1/30 or 1/31.)

So, that’s the end, right? 

Wrong.

The wife called my office around noon, telling me she’d just gotten home to find the third door tag.  (Maybe I’ll start a collection!) I told her I already knew, and that delivery was set for Monday. However, she told me the driver had written a note on the tag: “Will come back tomorrow but I’m always out of town before 12. You can call XXX-XXXX my cell and I could meet you.”

I figured, “What the hell?” and called. The driver, who was extremely nice, said that she had actually received the message requesting PM delivery, but her route only takes her through my town in the morning. She had tried to call me, too, but the phone number listed in the message was wrong. It wasn’t even close to right, even though phone rep #2 had repeated it back to me. She told me she was a “FedEx Home” driver, and that “Home” runs Tuesdays through Saturdays. (So wait, FedEx phone reps don’t even know what days their drivers deliver things?) 

It had been this same driver attempting delivery all three times, and she said she’d be back the next morning: Saturday, 1/28. “Will someone be home?”

I assured her I would. “Cool,” I thought, “I’ll finally be done with this tomorrow.” [Spoilers:  nope.]

She seemed willing to answer questions, so I asked her about the $11 charge for delivery address changes, referencing the earlier episode of the Express driver independently deciding to deliver to my office rather than my home. “Oh, Express guys are union. They can do stuff like that.” It seems Express drivers are unionized folks employed directly by FedEx, but Home and Ground drivers are hired through independent contractors.  And apparently, they aren’t treated as well. According to her, if a Home or Ground driver misdelivers a package – even if it’s just to the house next door and the customer still ends up receiving it – said driver can be fined $500 by FedEx. The fine is $1000 for a second occurrence. What I gleaned from our conversation is that FedEx is unwilling to accept any blame or cost themselves, instead shifting it all to contracted non-union drivers or – in the case of the address change fee – customers. 

At any rate, on the morning of 1/28, I was fooling around on my computer when the phone rang. The Caller ID showed “FEDEX GROUND”, so I guessed maybe someone was calling to make sure I was home. Sadly, no. Instead, it was a rep telling me the truck containing my package had broken down, so my package was sitting on the truck, in the shop. “So it won’t be delivered today,” he said.

“Is it standard procedure for you to leave packages on a broken-down truck, rather than moving them to another truck so they can be delivered?”

“Well,” he countered, “we didn’t expect the truck to break down. And it’s just your package and a few Ground packages on there.” (Gee, thanks for not answering my question in the slightest.)

Rep-number-the-fourth assured me that the package would be delivered Monday, 1/30. Then, “Oh, wait, it’s a FedEx Home package, so it’ll be Tuesday.”

I’ll hold my breath.