Which Shipping Company Is Kindest To Your Packages? 480
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."
Re:Package Penetration (Score:1, Informative)
I get OnTrac with a lot of my Prime orders. I've never had much trouble with FedEx or UPS, but OnTrac is TERRIBLE.
Re:When I worked for UPS (Score:3, Informative)
No surprise here (Score:3, Informative)
Proper packaging (Score:1, Informative)
In my time, I have shipped millions of dollars worth of equipment. It has never arrived damaged. OTOH, the packaging I used added a lot to the cost of delivery. If the equipment matters enough, it is worth packing properly.
If you doubt that packaging can make the difference, check out egg drop competitions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_drop_competition [wikipedia.org] Basically, you can build a package that can be dropped from any height without breaking the egg that it contains.
Re:Package Penetration (Score:4, Informative)
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.
At my last job, about 10 years ago, 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. Unfortunately the receptionist who signed for it didn't notice that when it was dropped off. We didn't even bother to open the box, we just called the vendor and arranged a swap.
The president's office at that company was very close to where the UPS trucks would park when delivering to the building. One day I was in there working on her laptop when they pulled up outside. The driver went in the back, and then one by one I saw the packages for our building come arcing out and hitting the ground outside the truck.
After those incidents I stopped using UPS whenever possible. When I cannot avoid using them, I use an absurd amount of padding and insure the package up the wazoo.
Shock Watch indicators help. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [agmcontainer.com]
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.
firsthand experience... (Score:5, Informative)
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:When I worked for UPS (Score:5, Informative)
Re:When I worked for UPS (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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:Shock Watch indicators help. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:In a just world... (Score:0, Informative)
i invite you to try. i live at
1313 Mockingbird Lane
Mockingbird Heights, CA
i have guns, dogs, curtains, and a box fort in my livingroom.
you have nothing because you are NOTHING.
Re:In a just world... (Score:0, Informative)
try 'wife', coward. rachel is now semi-professional on the donkey show circuit, soon to be promoted to ponies and small mustangs.
i studied for years to earn my a+ cert by my 29th birthday, and now assistant manage my local geeksquad branch.
why do you cower? what are you afraid of?
you are NOTHING.
Re:Wait, why? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Interesting but... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:When I worked for UPS (Score:3, Informative)
go spin your lies to someone else. a cylinder is more sturdy than a box... simple physics, moron. thanks for confirming the frequency of tube damage.
Yes, but a cylinder also has the property of being able to roll with ease. When a package rolls, it inevitably finds itself lodged under other cylinders called tires. The crush weight of whatever may roll over your tube will be considerably larger than what it is rated at. Something like this box [uline.com] will ship better than any cylinder and something like this [uline.com] will fare even better.
Re:US Postal Service (Score:5, Informative)
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:TSA (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:When I worked for UPS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Package Penetration (Score:3, Informative)
I used to have to go down to UPS's regional sorting facility in Pacoima (Los Angeles) to pick up packages. The sorting conveyors were clearly visible from the pickup window. Two interesting points:
-- Boxes fell as far as ~30 feet in the course of being shifted from one conveyor belt to another.
-- There was a HUGE pile (probably 30-40 feet across and 15 feet high) of obviously smashed boxes (in all shapes and sizes) shoved into the back corner beyond the conveyors, clearly having been put there via forklift.
=====
My personal experience across the past 40 years has been that if you want something to arrive intact, use USPS.
And for ghu's sake, DON'T use Canada Post!
Re:When I worked for UPS (Score:3, Informative)
Well... I know I am not lying, which is what you see to be accusing me of.
The computer is without question. I was physically there during delivery. It was a UPS truck, a UPS driver, etc. Pretty easy to conclude from the big UPS letters on the side of the truck. I never said the computer was over 120 lbs either. You assumed that. These drives were big, 5.25", long, and took up two bays each, but that does not get the computer to 120 lbs. I am a big guy and I was the one who lifted it to the table, but I can tell you it was not 120 lbs.
As for the Persian rug, those holes were unmistakable. It was a loading truck. I did not physically see delivery in that case, but the company sued UPS directly. So maybe you are correct in that instance, but I was told it was UPS and I am absolutely certain that was where we aimed the lawyers.
For the last 20 some odd years those two particular instances have been why I refuse to use UPS under any circumstances. Not because of the damage, but because of how they refused to accept responsibility.
At best, your half right. The computer was all I ever needed as a justification though.