The fact that I have a whole section on my website devoted to FedEx sucking probably tells you a lot about what I think of FedEx.

Today did everything to reinforce that sentiment.

I’ve been waiting for another package sent by Fed Ex. Why? Because no one gave me a choice to choose any other method of shipment except Fed Ex which is what I would choose.

Here’s what I’ve been looking at all day:

You will note that the “estimated” date of delivery is today: 2008-12-08.

You will also notice it is after 5:00 p.m. on 2008-12-08.

You can probably guess that the package is not here.

What I Did

Since I have a lot of experience dealing with Fed Ex, I know that “Estimated Delivery” means absolutely nothing to them. It is just there to placate people.

So when I saw that there was no tracking information updated today, I called the 800-number for Fed Ex and spoke to a representative.

Said representative was completely unhelpful, and clearly uninterested in expending any energy towards finding anything out about what might be going on.

She said, and then when I pressed further, said again that there was nothing in her system to indicate that the package wouldn’t be delivered today.

Notice the nicely slimy way that she put it? It’s not a promise, of course, it’s just her saying “Well, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be there today!”

Yeah, except that the tracking information from two days ago hasn’t been updated. It was never “arrival scanned” anywhere, and it is not “Out for Delivery” even though the Estimated Delivery date is today.

Could you help me? Could you check with the local hub to see if they have any information? Sure, she could have. But did she? No, she did not.

I kept waiting, I kept refreshing the page. No news.

Around 4:40 p.m. I went out to see if he had left a door tag despite the large sign saying “I AM HERE, I AM WAITING FOR THE PACKAGE” which he has done before.

Actually, what I suspect he does is know that the office closes at 1 p.m. and therefore decides not to bother even coming by. If questioned, he says that he had “run out of door tags” which is why one wasn’t left.

This has happened at least a half dozen times, which strains credulity, especially because one of the times that he claims we were “closed” was during a rummage sale when there was a full parking lot and people were coming in and out of the building all day long.

But he claimed we were “closed” at like 2 p.m.

Right. Sure you actually came by and thought that.

Call Back

So I called FedEx again.

This time the customer support person did call the hub (well, he put me on hold, and then told me that’s what he had done).

The reason for the delay?

Oh, the package isn’t actually out for delivery today. But it should be tomorrow.

Why hasn’t the tracking page been updated?

Oh, see, we have a problem with packages from Dell. “A lot of times the labels fall off.”

That’s an exact quote from the Fed Ex person.

“A lot of times the Dell labels fall off.”

(No explanation, by the way, of why this has happened several times in the past with Apple deliveries, none of which have shown any evidence of label problems.)

Ok, I asked, where is the package? It supposedly left Grove City two days ago, where did it go?

It’s still at Grove City.

He went on to say that he could see on his computer that it hadn’t actually left the Grove City hub.

Me: “So, what’s the point in having this tracking page at all?”

At this point he put on his snooty tech support “OK I’m going to make myself sound very polite to you now and reiterate what I’ve said several times already without actually answering your question” voice.

His salient, frequently reiterated points:

• Dell labels fall off a lot (although he couldn’t say whether that had actually happened in this situation, and if it had, he couldn’t explain to me how he knew where this package was if the package was sitting somewhere without a label on it.
• It should be delivered tomorrow.
• He put a “tracker” on this package. I have no idea what this means, I assume it’s mean to be some kind of internal “flag” in their computer system. I also assume it’s meant to sound impressive to the person on the phone, as if the agent will be personally keeping an eye on the progress of my delivery.

Yeah right.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Please let me choose which company to use, because I will use UPS every single time.

(Disclaimer: I realize that some people have the opposite experience with Fed Ex and UPS, but in 5 years of dealing with both companies here, Fed Ex has been relentlessly awful and unreliable, and UPS has been nearly flawless.)

Update: at 10:33 p.m. they posted a “Delivery Exception” stating “Customer not available or business closed.”

I can state this in no uncertain terms: FedEx lied.

Either they lied when I called them today, or their driver lied when he said I wasn’t there. Either way, they are liars. This was not an “oops mistake”. I was told, point blank, that the package was still in Grove City. Now I am being told that they tried to deliver it, but couldn’t.

One of these explanations is a lie.

I’ll bet you $1,000 that if I went down to the office right now and looked on the door, there would be no door tag. I bet if I ask him again tomorrow he’ll tell me that he “ran out”.

Again.

Update 2008-12-09: At approximately 2:00 p.m. there was a knock on the side door to our building.

It was FedEx.

I know what you’re thinking: “Yay!”

Right?

Wrong.

He had a box from Oriental Trading.

Me: “Do you have a Dell for me?”

Him: “Uh… let me check.”

He went back to the truck and sure enough there’s the computer I’ve been waiting for.

“They had it on the wrong shelf,” he explained.

I told him about the problems I had yesterday, including being told that the labels fall off (the label is fine) and that it was still in Grove City, and that the tracking page said we were closed at 10:30 p.m.

Which I thought would be the end of the story.

Except that he then went on to explain he had it yesterday.

Excuse me?

Yup, he had it, but thought it was supposed to be delivered next door, and they were closed by the time he got here, so he scanned it as “Customer Not Available.”

On the one hand, it’s incompetence (not helped by the fact that the only reason he knew to deliver it today was because he happened to have another package and I asked him about this one).

On the other hand, he apologized for the mistake, and took responsibility for it.

Unlike the folks I’ve talked to on the phone, who, if they did apologize, it was that vacant, meaningless, “the script tells me to apologize here, but really I don’t give a damn about your problems.”

You know the tone, everyone knows the tone.

Anyway, now I have to go setup a Windows machine, which is only slightly more painful than dealing with Fed Ex.

Is this not clear?

Because it looks pretty clear to me. How about this:

So I waited.

10:30 came.

11:00 came.

11:30 came.

I called FedEx.

11:37 and FedEx arrives. OH but it’s the FedEx guy who was delivering my dot-Mac package (for which a signed door tag was left yesterday, but he didn’t leave it. Why? Good question! Yet another example of FedEx not doing what they said they would do.).

My iMac is still not here.

11:39 FedEx calls and tells me that he can’t “come back” until 3-4. I say that I have a door tag here saying that he will be here by 10:30. She says that they are only obligated to attempt delivery once per day. Whu-huh?

“He was already there once this morning…” she starts.

“NO HE WASN’T!” I yelled. They pull this crap all the time, i.e. “Well we tried to deliver it but no one was there. Except that this morning I’ve been here and haven’t left.”

“Well let me get him back on the phone.”

She put me on hold.

A few minutes later, she came back, “Sir, delivery in your area isn’t even scheduled until 3-4pm..”

“I have a door tag here that says 10:30.”

Her: “He says he wrote 4:30 and maybe there was a misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding? Would you like me to scan this and email it to you? Would you like the tracking number and your website information so you can see that it says 10:30? The door tag says ‘We tried to deliver a shipment of 1 pieces at 15:03 [note the use of 24-hour time] on 12NOV07. ’ Then it says, in big bold letters: ‘We’ll return before 10:30 on 13NOV’… ”

Her: “Well clearly he isn’t going to be there by 10:30.”

“I know that, but telling me he isn’t going to be here until 3 is bull.”

Her: “He has to run his route in a certain order. If he goes to you and you’re way out we may not get to several people down the line in time.”

“That’s really not my problem. He said that he would be here by 10:30 and he’s not.”

Previously I mentioned to here 2 or 3 times that I was home from work because I was waiting for this package.

Her: “Do you work somewhere?”

“Do I work somewhere? Haven’t I already said several times that I’m home from work? Of course I work somewhere.”

Her: “He said he would be willing to try and deliver it to you at work if you wanted, which he is not obligated to do.”

(Only later did I think: “So he can deviate from his schedule to deliver it somewhere else, but not to honor the time that he said he would be here?” At the time I thought: “Yeah, I can see where this is going, I’ll go there and he’ll come here.” Plus it’s not very convenient for me to wait by the door of our office, and I can’t see the office door from my office. Plus it’s an iMac, I don’t want to lug it from the office to my car and from my car to the house when I had scheduled it to be delivered to my front door.)

Me: “Please don’t make it sound like he is doing me any favors when this whole situation was caused by him.”

So let’ recap:

1) She tried to tell me that he had been here already today, which was either a lie or ignorance.

2) She tried to tell me that the tag he left said 4:30, which is a lie as well as directly contradicting what I had told her. Fortunately for me I have documentation.

3) She told me that delivery in my area was only scheduled for the afternoon.

At no point was there any effort made to fulfill their obligation to me in a timely manner. There was not even a sense of any obligation at all, actually. “Oh, it says 10:30 but we meant 4:30” is neither an explanation nor an apology.

If I told you that I would be to your house by 10:30 and didn’t show up and didn’t call for an hour, you’d consider me rude. If I then called you at 11:40 to say that I meant 4:30, you’d think I was either rude or stupid, or both. Now consider that you are paying me and I told you I would be there by 10:30. Then, having told me that you are sitting home waiting for me, I tell you “Well I have other people to see, I can’t come by until late this afternoon.”

Would you stay friends with a person like that?

Would you continue to do business with a person like that?

This is not nearly the first time that I have had this problem with shipments from Apple via FedEx.

I ordered an iPod a few weeks ago. It was supposed to be delivered to the office on Friday. Now our office is closed on Friday, but we were having a rummage sale at the church, so I was there (with dozens of other people) all day long.

Sometime late in the afternoon, the tracking page said “Customer Not Available.” Which was a lie. No door tag was left (the driver told the dispatcher that he had run out. Convenient, eh?). Monday, he tried delivery at 5:05. To an office building. Which closes at 1pm (although people had been there until 3 or 4).

Mind you, we aren’t talking about New York City or Pittsburgh or Columbus. This is Gallipolis, Ohio, population 4,800.

The UPS guy can make it to us before 1pm no problem. The FedEx guy never even tries.

Oh, and no door tag was left on Monday either. Must have “forgotten” them again.

On Tuesday it was delivered to an office building next to ours. This same office building, by the way, was open on the previous Friday when he had (allegedly) tried to deliver a package and found no one home. (Actually my guess is that he knew that the office wasn’t scheduled to be open on Friday and so he never even bothered to check. Can’t prove it, of course, but he’d have to be completely blind to miss the people coming in and out of the building.)

It may be true that in order to be close to fulfilling their obligation to me, deliveries to some of their other customers may have been delayed.

That’s really not my problem.

I don’t say that to be rude or arrogant, just to state a fact. They were hired to do a job, and said that they would be done by 10:30 on Nov 13th. It may make business sense for them to just screw me over (1 customer) rather than delay several other deliveries. But honestly, our home is only a few miles from town, and again, we aren’t talking about hundreds of thousands of people here. Last I knew the population of the county was something like 30-40,000.

This is sloppiness (not minding one’s promises) and laziness (unwilling to try to do anything about it) and either ignorance or lying.

And it’s not just a one-time event. It’s a pattern, a habit. Search for FedEx on this site and you will see a great number of instances similar to this one. (Be sure to hit the “Older Entries” link at the bottom of the search results page, otherwise it may just look like there’s one match.)

I wish, I wish, I wish that Apple would offer its customers another shipping option.

Well this isn’t the first time that this has happened, but it’s the first time that I’ve had a group of church ladies as my witnesses.

It is now 4:07 p.m.

They arrived here at 8 a.m.

I’ve been here since 9 a.m.

We’re having a church rummage sale, so there have been people in and out all day long.

The FedEx guy claims that there was no one here at 2:26 p.m.

Well I don’t know where he was, but he sure as hell wasn’t here. And he sure didn’t even bother to drive by because if he had he would have seen that we have been here all day long.

There’s no “We Tried To Deliver a Package” note anywhere (which UPS always leaves if they try to come after we close).

Why?

Because he never came by, that’s why.

This comes on the heels of yesterday’s bait-and switch where they said it was going to be delivered on the 4th. Until 5 p.m. when they suddenly switched it to the 5th.

Now it’s the 8th.

I reported it to FedEx.com and then called the 800#.

Allegedly they are trying to track down the driver.

UPDATE: It’s now 6:00 p.m. and I haven’t heard from FedEx.

Raise your hand if you’re surprised.

Anyone?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

UPDATE: Ok, so I got a call around 7pm from someone claiming to be the dispatcher for our local FedEx hub. He said he had called the driver but couldn’t understand him. (Bad cell signal?) Apparently the driver parked in the alley behind the building and (if so) just went to the office and therefore missed the entire parking lot being filled with people coming and going. I asked why there wasn’t a door tag left. He said the driver had run out of them. I mentioned that in all the times this has happened before, I’ve never had a door tag left, and the driver hasn’t done anything with the signed release. He had no explanation, and he offered no solution. So, yet again, I’m going to be waiting over the weekend for a package which should have been delivered on Friday (or Thursday, if you believe their tracking page).

FedEx simply lies. There is no way around it.

Every time, every single dang blessed time that I’m expecting a FedEx package, it always says the same thing.

“Expect delivery on Day X” they say.

Day X arrives and it still says “Expect delivery on Day X” even when it hasn’t even arrived at the local distribution center.

Then, after the end of the day, they change it to say “Expect delivery on Day Y.”

What’s worse is that our local FedEx driver A) doesn’t know the hours we’re open so always tries to deliver hours after we’ve closed, and B) knows that we’re not usually open Friday, so he doesn’t even try to deliver it, even when either C) I’m there even thought the office is closed or D) I’ve put up a pre-authorization and asked him to deliver it next door.

I hate FedEx. I wish Apple would give me the choice of whether to send it FedEx or UPS. I’d choose UPS every.single.time. At least their website gives accurate information, and their local driver works really hard to get to our office before it closes.