What is your worst mail/parcel delivery service?

I now have the same problem with USPS. My house is two blocks down an unpaved road from the mailbox and the carriers are just too damn lazy to bring packages to the house.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter if a package is shipped by UPS or FedEx because these packages are just handed over to the USPS for the last leg anyways.

I find that the Amazon Prime couriers are excellent. They CANNOT use the mailbox so they always come to the house. They even bring the packages up the deck stairs to the upstairs door which they do not have to do.

complain to the post office, not here

I have horror stories for UPS, FedEx and DHL. UPS was simple, but it involved a LOT of money.

I had a $12,000 package coming by UPS. Signature was, of course, required. I was fortunate in that I arrived home within a couple of hours after the package had been left at my door with no signature, and that I just happened to have gone in through the front door that day - I don't know why - instead of going in through the garage like normal. It was just sitting there. UPS apologized. I could have lied and claimed I never got it and there would have been no proof that I did.

FedEx did much worse. Less money but still a lot, and they left it without getting my signature. Their driver signed my name to the device. It took a series of phone calls to find out that my neighbor forged my name, and that no, it wasn't that neighbor, it was another one, and a trip across the street to talk to the neighbor who is always home and sees everything, and saw the driver go up my walk with a package and come back without it in about as much time as it took to walk up, drop something, and walk out. The person I spike with was friends with the driver and was trying to protect him, and so I got back the shipping fee I had paid, which was about $30, out of this guy's pocket. I'm not out to get someone fired and I think that driver learned something that day.

DHL was the worst. I recommend that no one use them, ever. I had a package coming from Canada. Again, it was left with no signature, no one ringing my bell. This was required in this case because DHL claimed that there was a customs charge. They billed me for $75 for the 'brokerage fee' on collecting the customs charge. I went around and around with them on the phone, getting as high as the office of the president of US operations (they're based in Germany, I think), and they refused to back off on the charge, even though I explained to them that they had no right to to collect it.

When you are presented with anything, by mail, that requires you to sign or pay money, you ALWAYS have the right to refuse. ALWAYS. There may be consequences for your refusal, but that's a separate issue. Someone cannot send you something, have you accept it, and then bill you for something you knew nothing about. I was denied my right to refuse that package. Had I done so, the package would have gone back to the sender and maybe we could have figured out what had happened.

I did speak with the sender, and we figured out what had happened. Part of my order was something made in Canada - an import subject to duty- and part of it was made in the US and being shipped back into the US - not subject to duty. The amount subject to duty was below the point where US Customs would have charged anything, and that was evident in the Customs from on the package. If duty was imposed, it needed to be paid at the time of delivery. DHL failed to collect it, because there was nothing to collect. The driver probably saw there was no money involved and decided nothing had to be signed. But the company wanted $75 for their 'brokerage fee' for being the middleman between me and US Customs.

I told 'em to pound salt, and I also told that secretary in the president's office that if they turned the matter over to collections and damaged my credit, they would pay for it. I got three more bills, wrote 'refused' across all of them and sent them back, and never heard another thing.

Now, as for USPS. Yes, there is an occasional delay.

For me, the occasional delay of a day or even two is not a big deal. I rent a PO box and why packages go there, because I found UPS, FedEx, DHL all to be unreliable. If you're not going to be home, and I wasn't, I was always at work, good luck asking those companies to come by at a time when you will be home. They won't do it. Three attempts with UPS and then you have to go to them to pick it up, or it goes back. I can ask USPS to bring a package the next day to my house and they will. I don't, because I use my box. And, once in a while, I will go to the PO to get a package that the UPS or FedEx tracking shows as 'delivered' only to be told that they can't find it, and that's because USPS has cut its inside staffing. The package was delivered, it's sitting with everything else UPS or FedEx dropped off that day but management didn't provide enough staffing for to get sorted.

I have a lot more to say about USPS delivery issues, and I want to say upfront that I was proud of the work I did as a USPS carrier for 38 years. I retired in 2017, mainly because I could no longer take the physical demands of the explosion in the package volume. I was one of those older guys who rarely made a mistake, but, as I will explain, even I was making more than I used to. Mine were simply finding a package later in the day when the truck was emptying out for a delivery I had already passed, and there was no time at the end of the day to go back.

The main issue is the requirement that a scan be performed every step of the way. It doesn't matter that the available choices for a scan do not always fit what actually happened. That scan MUST be made. Upper management bonuses depend on timely reporting of package status, not timely delivery of packages. Once you understand that management's #1 goal is the perpetuation of management and the protection of their bonuses, you can begin to understand some of the systemic problems USPS has. Yes, carriers and internal package handlers make mistakes, too, but management isn't that interested in fixing the issues that lead to many of those mistakes, they just invented a system to 'make the numbers', and then put all of the blame for mistakes on the workers.

Here's one example. Package growth has exploded in the wake of growing online sales, and Amazon is a big part of that. USPS would not have carriers working on Sundays if it were not for Amazon. But Amazon is delivered the other six days, along with the packages that UPS and FedEx turn over to USPS for 'last mile delivery' - these companies take the money from the paying customer and give a small percentage of that money to USPS to do the actual delivery. USPS likes it because they say - which is true - 'Hey, we already go to those addresses every day anyway.'

The problem is, it takes extra time to deliver packages. Most of this type of shipping does not fit in a carrier's satchel. A separate drop-off needs to be made during the course of delivering a route. Well, USPS management KNOWS it takes longer to complete a route when you have 30 drop-offs instead of the 10 that were built into the time for that route during the last route inspection/adjustment. But they EXPECT that route to be completed in the same amount of time. Some carriers will not and are justified in taking the extra time when needed, and when they properly document their workload for the day on paper and have management either approve the overtime or give the needed help from another carrier to complete the route in the assigned time, these carriers are OK. But many carriers don't do the paperwork, some managers violate their own rules by ignoring the paperwork, and carriers are pressured to get done.

This is when mistakes happen. Your carrier doesn't have the extra minute to go up to your door that day. On another day, they might have the time. On the day they don't, they take the package back. In the old days, before tracking and scanning, this happened (a lot less often, usually it was because a carrier just missed one, and it was 'I'll do it tomorrow'). YOU never knew about it because there was no tracking. Now you know about it. So, there has to be that scan, and there is no choice on the menu for 'I didn't have time' or 'Oops, missed that one'. Because the 'out for delivery' scan was made that morning and you can see it, of course you're going to question why it now says 'Business closed' or 'attempted' or even some others. The carrier shouldn't do that but management leaves them no choice.

You mentioned one package being delivered when another is not. Well, the packages were mailed separately, were they not? They are not wrapped together in plastic. You should see how full one of the standard delivery trucks is when it leaves the office - just how crammed full with packages it is. It's a logistical nightmare for carriers most days, trying to organize them in the morning while loading the truck. These things are 30 years old now and were not designed for heavy package delivery. Ever see inside a UPS truck? They have shelves. The trucks are not loaded by the drivers, they are loaded by others and the driver is given a package manifest - a list of what they have and the order it is to be delivered in. USPS does this for Amazon Sundays, but that's only because Amazon has the software to produce a manifest for what it's dropping off. The carriers still have to load the trucks on Sundays, using those lists, and without shelves to organize.

The rest of the week, though, there is no manifest. So the carrier must rely on their memory. That is the way the job always was, but you didn't have to remember more than 20-30 a day between small ones that fit in the mailbox and big ones that didn't. Now, it's rare to have a day where there fewer than 20 large and 50 small.

So, every day, even the sharpest carrier might miss one. And it must have that scan.

My favorite is GSO overnight.

But unfortunately, you don't get to use them.

Besides that... they are all mostly the same...

Amazon bothers me that they won't ring the doorbell, throw the package on the porch, and 5 minutes later I get a notification of a delivery on my phone.

DHL just gave KFC a right food rogering.