After the recent discussion about diverting a missed delivery, I recently had two occasions to request a delayed delivery because I was out of town. One experience was with UPS, and the other was with FedEx. Both requests were made after the wine was shipped, but before it was delivered.
UPS charged me extra for the delayed delivery. In fact they charged me twice, because I was receiving two cases on the same day from the same winery. It was all part of the same order, but UPS treated it as two orders. Which is fine. But then UPS went ahead and delivered both cases on the original delivery date. I was able to get a refund of the fees I paid them.
FedEx, on the other hand, provided the service free of charge, and the wine showed up on the requested delayed delivery date. But I must comment that their website was exceedingly difficult to navigate.
Glad one worked out for you. My experience is always FedEx worse.
UPS does a divert to UPS shop for a fee for each package or unlimited for a year with My Choice membership for $20. I have used the divert several times for wine shipments, and re-up each year in the fall since there is a UPS store much closer to me than Fed-Ex hub. I’m near Yakima, WA and have always had better service from UPS vs. FedEx.
It is interesting to note that FedEx handles about 16 million packages per day. UPS and USPS each handle about 24 million packages each day.
I had a kooky thing happen a few weeks back. A shipment was mistakenly sent to a now-closed customer center at a still operational UPS hub. For whatever reason, UPS didn’t flag it as undeliverable and contact the shipper, or me as the recipient . Instead they just delivered it to the nearest UPS Store, which is of course a franchise. I get a call from the store manager who tells me to get the box, I have to sign up for a mail box there and then also pay a fee to ‘receive’ the box. I explain what happened and they are like ‘well your other choice is to refuse it and then when it pops back up on tracking, get it re-directed to the address you want’. OK, let’s do that. But the box just disappears into limbo once it’s picked up. A few days later, I get a call from the same UPS hub it was originally addressed to, from a very helpful person who tells me I can come pick it up. The whole thing was rather odd but I guess all’s well that ends well.