I stopped using Fedex years ago when, instead of delivering my HSU subwoofer, the driver snuck quietly to my front door and put a try again tag on the door. I was home the entire time and he never even attempted to ring a doorbell or in any way notify anyone of his presence. He simply did not want to carry a heavy package up my hill of a driveway.
Unfortunately, I had too many occurrences like that with Fedex and decided to part company. I’m not saying all Fedex drivers are bad, but it seems a larger % are when compared to the service offered by competitors.
One reason for this is that only Fedex Express are Fedex employees (and Fedex express, while expensive, is almost always good service). Fedex Ground is run as a separate company within Fedex and the drivers are all contractors with no allegiance, loyalty or pride of ownership or brand (and a high turnover rate).
Since then, I have used USPS for all small packages and UPS for all large packages and items that USPS will not handle. I have never had the first issue, lost package, late delivery or otherwise with USPS. As another poster stated earlier, my USPS driver puts all of my packages and mail by my side door out of view from the road. The icing on the cake is that USPS is also less expensive than any of the others.
UPS has been fairly good as well, albiet usually more expensive for the same class of service. My only real complaint with UPS is a total lack of predictability of delivery time. My USPS deliveries show up at the same time, every day, six days a week. My UPS deliveries (all using the same class of service) might show up at 11am one day and 8pm the next making planning for things like JIT production challenging.
One last word - my business is located 100 yards from a major Fedex hub and shipping office, but the service has been so bad and expensive that I happily drive 5 miles to USPS or 9 miles to UPS. When I first leased the building, I had images in my head of being able to pallet jack outgoing shipments over to Fedex two or three times a day, but alas, it was not to be.
Unfortunately, I had too many occurrences like that with Fedex and decided to part company. I’m not saying all Fedex drivers are bad, but it seems a larger % are when compared to the service offered by competitors.
One reason for this is that only Fedex Express are Fedex employees (and Fedex express, while expensive, is almost always good service). Fedex Ground is run as a separate company within Fedex and the drivers are all contractors with no allegiance, loyalty or pride of ownership or brand (and a high turnover rate).
Since then, I have used USPS for all small packages and UPS for all large packages and items that USPS will not handle. I have never had the first issue, lost package, late delivery or otherwise with USPS. As another poster stated earlier, my USPS driver puts all of my packages and mail by my side door out of view from the road. The icing on the cake is that USPS is also less expensive than any of the others.
UPS has been fairly good as well, albiet usually more expensive for the same class of service. My only real complaint with UPS is a total lack of predictability of delivery time. My USPS deliveries show up at the same time, every day, six days a week. My UPS deliveries (all using the same class of service) might show up at 11am one day and 8pm the next making planning for things like JIT production challenging.
One last word - my business is located 100 yards from a major Fedex hub and shipping office, but the service has been so bad and expensive that I happily drive 5 miles to USPS or 9 miles to UPS. When I first leased the building, I had images in my head of being able to pallet jack outgoing shipments over to Fedex two or three times a day, but alas, it was not to be.