Worse Than the Postal Service

I'm all bummed out today, because my favorite source of online vitamins and supplements is using UPS.

I take several supplements, in the vain hope that they will make me healthier and help me have a better quality of life. And I generally use Vitacost.com, because they ship cheap and fast. But my last order just went back to their shipping center, because UPS can't find my house. Which has been here for over 50 years. Can't find it. Fifty years aren't enough. Never mind that UPS brings me at least two deliveries every month, and the driver knows me personally, because I order homebrewing stuff, and he's a homebrewer.

I checked on the order last week and realized that it was screwed up, and I called the idiots at UPS, and I assured them that the address was correct. Today I checked again, and in spite of my intervention, the package had been sent back to Utah.

I thought it was remarkable that they were having problems, because in the past Vitacost had been really fast. Order on Monday, get your pills on Wednesday, without a second-day air fee. Then I remembered. In the past, they used FEDERAL EXPRESS.

I used to order stuff from Netrition.com all the time, but I quit after they sent me a package of protein bars that had turned into mush while UPS drove around in circles trying to find my house. Coincidentally, the Vitacost order I'm complaining about contained protein bars. I never order protein bars online, because of the problems I had with Netrition. But I made an exception this time. And look what happened.

It's like God is trying to punish me for using UPS. They're absolute idiots. They never do anything right. They're worse than the US Postal Service, which is really saying something.

Back when I practiced law, I received a painful lesson that put me and my firm off UPS permanently. I sent a time-sensitive document to Tallahassee, and it was supposed to arrive the next day. UPS delivered it one month later. Needless to say, in the meantime, I had had to do the whole process over again. From that day forward, absolutely nothing went out by UPS. It cost them a lot of money, but they didn't care enough to contact us and ask us why we quit using them. We were happy. UPS was apparently happy. Fedex was definitely happy. I guess it worked out okay. I'm trying to remember problems I've had with Fedex, and the only one I can recall happened in 1997.

Today I asked the CSR at UPS why they didn't call me instead of sending the package to Utah. And she said they don't give their drivers phone numbers. If you've ever used Fedex, you know that the waybill has a space for your number and the recipient's number. I asked her why UPS didn't do that. She did not know. And I'm sorry to say, I hung up. I should not have done that, but UPS screws up over and over, and it's just a bit tiresome. It's especially irritating when you're ordering vitamins, and they put you in a position where you can either buy locally at greater expense, or do without your vitamins for days, while UPS pulls its head out of its ass.

I don't know why UPS is so awful. Maybe it's because they're unionized. I don't know if the unions ever managed to infect Fedex. They used to be union-free, and saying a company is union-free is like saying a person doesn't have tertiary syphilis.

I'm all done with Vitacost. Their CSR told me they had a dispute with Fedex, so presumably, it's going to be UPS from here on out, and while I'm willing to put up with UPS for some things, I can't trust them with vitamins and perishable items. They are just too damned stupid.

I'll bet a whole bunch of my readers have had bad experiences with UPS, too. It can't just be me. Not when it happens this often.