The way UPS has dealt with the recent bad weather in WA and OR is insulting. No one expects deliveries to proceed at normal pace when there's a snowstorm, but UPS seems to have fallen on their ass and enjoys the show of their own falling apart.
They are now days behind and on top of that they are working at reduced capacity. Not only packages aren't delivered (some residential neighborhoods are still covered in slush, although all main roads in Seattle are fine) but people are told they cannot pick theirs up at the local distribution centers. My package has been stuck in the Seattle UPS center for 5 days now and I keep hearing the same things when I call - due to bad weather (there hasn't been any new bad weather since last Sunday) we stopped all ground deliveries, etc etc. Apparently, because of the "concerns related to the safety of the employees" they don't allow people to come and pick up their parcels either. This doesn't make much sense; people would gladly drive in the snow to the local UPS center and stay in line to pick up their packages, and UPS can easily beef up support at those facilities by paying overtime rates to a handful of employees.
I was finally able to get a manager on the phone who admitted they were 7 days behind with the deliveries. How is it possible that a company the size of UPS, with their considerable logistical and material resources goes belly up over three days of heavy snowing? A snowstorm is a rare event in Seattle, so someone on the Midwest or Northeast tell me, does UPS perform that poorly every winter? Is this snowstorm just a convenient cover up for the fact that they can't cope with the volume of holiday deliveries anyway?
It's during crisis situations when companies gain or lose the respect of their customers. UPS has certainly lost mine. I wish I could say I will never use UPS again, but unfortunately I have no choice. I'd feel better about this if at least UPS would not bombard ups with all the work-ethic ads, "what can brown do for you" etc, who extol the virtues of the business and the idea that the customer is King and always gets their service on time. Nobody at UPS cares when the customer gets their delivery; most times things just work fine, but when they fail, they fail monumentally. What's the customer got to do, it's not like there are so many alternatives...
Incidentally, a Google search for the sentence "UPS sucks" yields 15,300 results today. Searching for "FedEx sucks" yields only 7,470 results. Which means that UPS sucks roughly twice as much as FedEx.
Happy holidays!
They are now days behind and on top of that they are working at reduced capacity. Not only packages aren't delivered (some residential neighborhoods are still covered in slush, although all main roads in Seattle are fine) but people are told they cannot pick theirs up at the local distribution centers. My package has been stuck in the Seattle UPS center for 5 days now and I keep hearing the same things when I call - due to bad weather (there hasn't been any new bad weather since last Sunday) we stopped all ground deliveries, etc etc. Apparently, because of the "concerns related to the safety of the employees" they don't allow people to come and pick up their parcels either. This doesn't make much sense; people would gladly drive in the snow to the local UPS center and stay in line to pick up their packages, and UPS can easily beef up support at those facilities by paying overtime rates to a handful of employees.
I was finally able to get a manager on the phone who admitted they were 7 days behind with the deliveries. How is it possible that a company the size of UPS, with their considerable logistical and material resources goes belly up over three days of heavy snowing? A snowstorm is a rare event in Seattle, so someone on the Midwest or Northeast tell me, does UPS perform that poorly every winter? Is this snowstorm just a convenient cover up for the fact that they can't cope with the volume of holiday deliveries anyway?
It's during crisis situations when companies gain or lose the respect of their customers. UPS has certainly lost mine. I wish I could say I will never use UPS again, but unfortunately I have no choice. I'd feel better about this if at least UPS would not bombard ups with all the work-ethic ads, "what can brown do for you" etc, who extol the virtues of the business and the idea that the customer is King and always gets their service on time. Nobody at UPS cares when the customer gets their delivery; most times things just work fine, but when they fail, they fail monumentally. What's the customer got to do, it's not like there are so many alternatives...
Incidentally, a Google search for the sentence "UPS sucks" yields 15,300 results today. Searching for "FedEx sucks" yields only 7,470 results. Which means that UPS sucks roughly twice as much as FedEx.
Happy holidays!
