Let’s face it Jeff Bezos has spoiled us— he built a company out of a garage on the premise that if you want something and you have to order it for delivery that you’ll have it in two days or less. Most of us dinosaurs can remember the days of mailing a check to some ad on TV and then waiting 6-8 weeks for the cheap junk to arrive. Jeff took this concept and said NAY NAY. We can do better. And he did. Sometimes we get our cheap junk THE SAME DAY.
That’s impressive.
Not quite as impressive is everyone else who moves packages from Point A to Point Z with “tracking” so we can follow along. Here then are my thoughts on the best and worst shippers out there.
#1 - USPS - as hard as it is to imagine a service run by the government, albiet in a strictly hands off government way— gets the top spot. If you send something PRIORITY MAIL it is very likely going to arrive in a timely fashion and in one piece. They have flaws. I’ve had occasions where something is listed as arriving on the following day and when you check it’s location its so far away it’s impossible. By the same token I’ve had cases where that exact thing happened and IT DID arrive.
I’ve also had AWAITING ITEM jump right to being in my mailbox before anything else is even updated. So despite a few hiccups the USPS is the way to go.
#2 - DHL Express— I don’t know how they do it but they get a package to me from Japan in three days.
#3- FEDEX AIR - make sure its air. It’s a distant third, it still gets items where it needs to go but they’ve fallen a long way from when they were the dominant mover of packages. They don’t update tracking barely at all, and it’s willy nilly when you might actually see your item.
#4- UPS Not Ground - whatever they call this— UPS is a distant fourth from Fed Ex’s third place — for a number of reasons, not the least of which is sometimes they deliver at 9pm. Tracking is worse than FEDEX and often estimated delivery days are off by a week.
#5 up— all the rest— because UPS GROUND, FED EX GROUND and the rest might as well say “Good chance your package is going to arrive in a month or not at all”. That’s not much of an exaggeration. I always grown when a shipper chooses this option and when I’m buying something myself I ALWAYS choose Priority Mail because the $4-$8 I save is worth it over the hours I’ll spend for the next month trying to figure out when the item I bought is going to arive.