Shippers and customer service

Who wins the Salt Lake to Shoreline shipping challenge? 

My good friend’s birthday is the second week of November. In late October, I purchased a glass coffee press, put some organic tea pouches and a birthday card into the box with it, placed the box into a padded envelope, dropped it off at my Salt Lake City neighborhood mail counter, and sent it on its merry way to Shoreline, WA. I was disappointed to learn, by checking the tracking system, that it would not make her birthday. It was scheduled for delivery November 12; it wasn’t. I asked her to watch for it as the USPS tracking site showed it was delivered November 12. 

This is my coffee press but it is a reasonable facsimile of the intended gift.

I was shopping at Fashion Place before Thanksgiving when I read she still hadn’t received it. She lamented that the USPS hadn’t delivered my earlier gifts to her either. Feeling guilty and angry for not remembering, I purchased a necklace and shipped it via UPS. I checked UPS’s tracking site, since I’d paid for two day service, to see if the new gift made it. The UPS tracking site was down. I alerted my friend and she responded saying it had made it, but not in the two day window, and she thanked me. 

Two days later, the coffee press was sitting on my doorstep, the label said “undeliverable, address not found.” I removed the tattered padded envelope and birthday wrap from around the coffee press and replaced the birthday card with a Christmas card. The press and the original packing material were intact, and I re-wrapped it in Christmas paper, and inserted it into a new padded envelope. I took the now Christmas gift to the FedEx counter in my local Office Max store and re-shipped it.

A couple of days later, the opened, trashed package appeared on my doorstep.  Again. I heard the broken glass rattle as I picked it up. It was beyond shattered. The box and shipping envelope, that had been reopened and re-taped, were full of varied size glass shards. I contacted my friend and asked her what she wanted for Christmas that I could do online since shipping to Shoreline was in neither of us’ best interest. She offered suggestions and she was sent a Nordstrom online gift card. I called the FedEx customer service number on the label that stated “broken contents” and was sent claim forms. Insurance is included with the shipping fee, up to a certain amount. Unfortunately, I can’t find the original receipt so I chalked up the episode as a lesson learned. 

Much to my surprise, January 9, I received a phone call from an Office Max customer service agent to apologize and tell me that the package I had shipped from Office Max had been damaged. She also told me that FedEx denied the claim because the packaging wasn’t appropriate. She left the message in a voice mail and I returned the call just to relate the story so we could both laugh. The USPS managed to get it to Shoreline and back in one piece but FedEx destroyed it. UPS doesn’t come away clean either since its tracking system wasn’t functioning or reliable. 

The winner of the shipping challenge is: Office Max for reaching out to this consumer who won’t ship anything ever again to Shoreline but will definitely be shopping at Office Max. Kudos to its customer service! 

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