So, I’m a member of Amazon Prime which means that anything that ships from Amazon comes automatically with 2 day delivery. This is pretty sweet.
A couple of days I shot a note to Amazon because I was a bit disappointed that one of my orders did not arrive when it was supposed to. It arrived two days later. This is not a big deal but I found it a bit annoying that clearly the delivery service (FedEx SmartPost) was – according to their tracking information – basically sitting on the package at their facility (local to me) for two days. Amazon no longer seems to send out mini-surveys asking when shipped items have arrived so I wanted to let them know that one of their shippers appears to be sleeping on the job.
As I look back at some previous orders it seems that UPS has been consistently on time while FedEx… well maybe not so much.
The funny thing is, partly due to their advertising efforts and partly due to past experience, I hold FedEx in higher esteem of the two.
In what turned out to be a kind of mini-test, I ordered two items from Amazon on Wednesday. It happens that one (25 LB Uninterrupted Power Supply) was shipped via UPS, the other (2 lbs Brass couplings) shipped by FedEx Smartpost.
You look at the tracking information and you can see that the FedEx package actually arrived in Marietta before the UPS package arrived in Roswell. Both of these points are the last hops before delivery. The UPS package arrived today a bit after 3 pm and is sitting here beside me. The forecast for the FedEx package is to arrive maybe sometime before 8 pm on Sunday (two more days).
I’m glad I’m not counting on the second package being here for the weekend…
Could be that the headquarters for FedEx is Memphis, Tennessee and UPS is Sandy Springs, Georgia. That shouldn’t affect it but it probably does.
Even if it did, the package arrives in Marietta before 8 in the morning and then… nothing for 2 days.
I do not recall exactly but want to say I have had similar problems with fedex. Depending on certain things at some point they deliver the package to the post office and have local mail services deliver it. This will certainly add delay and tracking issues to your items.
We do not say the “F” word in our house it is forbidden. So we always use UPS unless we have no choice, even then we try to avoid the “F” word when we need something shipped.