Rant Why are international shipping/courier services so crap at everything?

They have one job, to get things from A to B safely. Why can't they F****** do it?

Background is I recently sent a PC to my brother in the states. I was paranoid as hell about them breaking things, so I took a lot of precautions. I filled the inside of the case with foam and packing snakes to provide support for the parts. I made a custom flight case for it (it's in a Parvum S2.0) that fitted the build perfectly, no internal movement there.

I then bubble wrapped the flight case and used polystyrene corner braces, the whole thing was then placed into a thick cardboard box and fully sealed. How the hell did they manage to break it so badly???

Damage wise, the top radiator (it's a coolermaster CLC, not full on WC) was ripped from the roof through the mounting screws. The graphics card was crushed so badly by the radiator that it ripped the PCIe slot off the motherboard, the rear PCIe IO brace was bent outwards too. This is a piece of steel that was bent. This is only the damage that I know about too, I wouldn't be surprised if the HDD was ripped from its mount too, but my brother couldn't show me that. I'll be having a closer look via facetime tomorrow.

Why do they hire such incompetent sh***? What do we have to do to be able to ship something safely to another bloody country? Hell how does Singularity Computers manage it?? I basically followed all the same steps, some even more securely. It's beyond pathetic.

What's worse is that nobody will be held accountable. This must happen to so many people, it's unreal that there's not more we can do about it.

 

good rant. 4/5

 

Blimey! Pics please

 

i understand your frustration BUT if i was to send a PC i'd pack every part separately...

 

Only an option when the person you're sending it to can be trusted to build it on the other end unfortunately. It's not that he's incompetent technically, I just know that if it were sent as parts, it would remain just that for the rest of the year.

 

Did you get the shipping insurance?

 

Well since this has turned into a shipping rant, may as well add some new ones to the list.

First up is just a fantastic cap to the previous event really. So Justin over at Parvum Systems very kindly offered to send a replacement case to my brother directly, free of charge no less. According to UPS it was delivered, only my brother never received it. In fact, the person who signed for it apparently doesn't even exist in the hall records, certainly not somebody who worked at the front desk. So in other words it was stolen. There is no record of exactly where UPS took the damn thing to, all it says is that they left it in "residential" in Syracuse, that could mean bloody anything couldn't it??

Next up is FedEx again, only the UK branch this time. Now I've noticed, rather alarmingly, that my local delivery guys are taking to leaving packages outside the front door. These are signed deliveries they're leaving, even when somebody is in the from room by the door! Not even a knock. I ordered a camera last Friday, it arrived yesterday morning, but I was not happy with a couple things. First was the condition of the box, what the hell did they do to this thing?? Thankfully the camera was in its retail packaging, it's also built like a tank to begin with, but it could have been something else less sturdy.

The second, and IMO much worse thing was what they did with it. I was out at the time grabbing a bite to eat, I checked the tracking to see whether it had been delivered in my absence. Sure enough it had been and was signed for by the neighbour apparently. All as good until I got back to discover that had not been the case. They had left it on the front step, not even in the alcove to the right, next to it on the floor was the slip saying they'd missed us. There was no information written on the slip and they didn't even bloody post it through the letterbox. What the hell is going on there? Somebody could easily have just walked away with it, I was livid.

 

At work today I got a call from a customer saying that UPS had delivered a component damaged. This thing is part of an R&D project and so its estimated worth is ~£10,000. Thing is, it's basically a lump of superalloy. I don't know whether to be extremely angry or extremely impressed that UPS could actually damage the thing. Seriously, they must have gone out of their way to do it.

I had our delivery lady ask about claiming on insurance but UPS started to ask 'what percentage of the delivery was damaged'? IT'S A SINGLE F**KING COMPONENT YOU MORONS. Additionally, the customer was on an extremely tight deadline, so they've opted to bend parts back into position, which means that we can't make any claims now since UPS require about two days to come and inspect the part.

A lot of time, effort and money went into making it and several people were involved. Cheers UPS.

 

My recent experiences with DHL proved a bit annoying.

A couple of weeks ago I had to ship some oceanagraphic research equipment from Glasgow to Hamburg, it was a total of about 500Kg at a guesstimate value of £200K. So as DHL were our preferred shippers I used them and it cost about £900-ish to go by road. Today I asked them to bring the same kit back only to be told that DHL will not ship from Germany and I though WTF?!! It turns out that what they actually meant was that DHL UK will not ship something back from Germany, if I want to do that I need to contact DHL in Germany to do that. I'm not sure if this is being pedantic or if I'm just a bit ticked off with DHL as a result of two other unrelated recent problems.
One was a 24hr delay on a flight to East Midlands due to high winds, normally not an issue but this was a DNA sample that was chilled by gel-paks, fine for 24 hours but not 48. When asked about compensation for a delayed delivery and potentially ruined expensive samples they decided that as our samples did survive the delay without any degredation it was a polite but firm "piss off, not our fault its was windy". The next time we shipped samples we reused other boxes that had items sent to us (just like we always do) this time because they could see a warning label through the parcel tape we sealed the box with that referred to something that wasn't declared on the shipping documents and wasn't even in the box the parcel was returned because of undeclared contents.

 

Ways to guaranteed an item is destroyed -

Give it to a toddler and tell them they can't touch it.
Give it to a courier with a 'fragile' sticker.
Claim it's unbreakable on live TV.

 

They're not crap at everything - I hear they're very good at football. Must be all the practice they get kicking folks parcels around.

I'm here all week, try the fish etc.

 

I used to work at Aria as a build tech. The number of systems that went out fine (I know they were fine as I personally built and tested them) but arrived DOA was obscene. We used Citylink back then and I must admit I was not at all surprised that they went under.

 

They broke it, they should pay to replace it. Down to you to prove it though.

 

^^True.

This reminded me of the Peli Cases warranty, pretty indestructible plastic cases that are covered for mostly everything other than "Shark bite, Bear Attack and children under 5"!!!

Wasn't sure if I mis remembered, but it's here

 

i heard that once...a nokia 3310 was damaged by sending it via an international courier

it is, only a rumour...what dark magic they must have used is a secret known only to those who work in the trade

seriously though, its mainly the baggage handlers at the airports that are the problem

 

Immovable object, irresistible force... I had a 3310 though, so I still don't quite believe it.

Anyone have any recommendations for an international courier that doesn't treat your stuff like crap? Does such a thing actually exist?

 

Hum...i can't even remember when I received the last damage item, get/send about 2-3 parcels a week.
Most of it isn't international though

 

Probably one of the biggest easier said than done processes imaginable mind.

Even with insurance, it's a pig of a thing to claim for damages against these people. I'm still going through the claim for the original complaint at the top of the page. I documented everything, pictures before, after in between etc. but it's still taking ages. They asked for a photo of the inside of the flight case yesterday so that they could inspect the foam. On one hand that makes sense, on the other hand if they had done their job properly everything should have arrived fine even without a foam lining (which it did have).

They're big companies, they can push things around and you can't harm them via poor reviews as quite often people send things out of necessity. Only UPS and FedEx currently ship to where my brother is, what a choice...

Here's a picture of the box containing my camera btw, how about that dent eh?

 

Highly recommend DPD as a dependable courier, never found a bad thing to say about them.

 

Luckily I have never had this experience, although I have seen some BADLY delivered parcels before. A few of the people I work with used to work for a company called DPD in which they were given really silly delivery times/targets to achieve. From what I gathered, they sometimes used to throw some things over gates/fences/bushes onto the recipients land :s