FedEx school for shippers and customers:

Learn more for each troubled shipment… These are little handy notes to keep in mind. Maybe as a sticky?

  1. An adult signature shipment can NOT be re-directed. Ever.
  2. A FedEx Ground shipment (which is what most wineries use by default) can NOT be upgraded to overnight or otherwise be sped up.
  3. If you want to hold at a local Walgreens or FedEx center, the re-direction takes 24hr to get into effect. But it will then supersede the first attempt at your house, so if you think it might get there in time, it’s always better to have them implement the hold after you can’t wait any longer. If you do it immediately, they won’t attempt at your house and things slow down by 24hrs.
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also, if you are never home for shipments (like me), Fed-ex stores are your friend.

you CAN have your wine re-routed to a Fed-ex pack and ship location to pick up within a 5 day window, and their hours are more reasonable. the one by me is open till like 8:00 or something. UPS makes this much harder, you can only change delivery to a customer care center (where the trucks actually get loaded), not a UPS store.

I don’t find #3 true for me if I’m understanding it correctly.

As long as I place a hold request for my FedEx center before it’s on the truck for delivery it’s available for pick-up on the original day. Sometimes I’ve had same day hold requests go through.

Hmmm, not sure about rule #1 or #3. I do it all the time and just did it this week. Once I have tracking from FedEx on wine shipments I redirect them to the local FedEx store for pick up and unless something happens in route, they arrive in the standard shipping window. I have five days to pick up at my convenience.
UPS charges me $19.95 a year to do the same thing, buts it’s worth it to me to be able to pick up at the UPS store. I can hard code my UPS preference into my account so I don’t need to do anything. UPS just sends it to the local store.

FedEx has its own structure. The ground routes are run by independent operators. If your pickup spot is on the same operator as the address, the pivot can occur same day as they just put it on a different truck. OTOH, if it is a different operator, the package has to get re-routed to that operator’s base location and it can be >24 hrs. My closest pickup location is a different operator, but I have had a package taken within an hour of missed delivery to a different pickup location slightly further away but on the same route.

Express services are all run by FedEx itself and delivery changes will be different. This also explains #2 - the systems are not that connected.

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On #1 - As pointed out above, not true at all. I redirect to Fedex pickup locations all the time.
On #3 - Also not necessarily true. Depends on a lot of factors. I’ve redirected and had things show up available to pickup within an hour. Depends if it is a ground or Express, if the driver has been to the drop off point, how close the depot is, etc etc etc.

OK, I was prob not clear enough. You can re-direct to a FedEx pickup location, but not to another party our personal wine storage etc. At least that’s what the guy at FedEx told me, after multiple attempts to do so.

I think the only rule with FedEx is there are no rules.

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It all depends on where you reside.