I get frustrated when a business says something is delivered when it isn't.

 

How many of you use Amazon and get notices that your products have been delivered when this is not so?  Well, I'm tired of these presumptive notifications from vendors, as false positives cause a lot of grief when deliveries are time-sensitive.

Years ago, I subscribed to Amazon Prime because they advertised 2-day delivery for most products.  This was very important, as Amazon was the only place where I could find a girl's locking diary that I could give to a young girl before Christmas.  Today, things are different.  On Amazon's site, they tell users to do the following:

1 - Confirm shipping address in Your Orders
2 - Look for a notice of delivery attempt
3 - Check around the delivery location
4 - Ask your household members and neighbors
5 - Wait 48 hours for the package to be delivered
6 - You can check with the carrier

You'd think that Amazon (and its carriers) could always take a photograph of the delivered object where it was delivered, and include that photo as part of an email confirming delivery.  This was helpful to RQS when her package was delivered to the building next door, and made it to her place a day later.  But false positives can cause big problems.

Quite often, I get false positives from Amazon and UPS regarding product deliveries.  The worst of these occurred a while back when UPS and I got our signals cross when I ordered a phone from Motorola.  The confusion had me going back and forth between UPS and Motorola trying to find out where the product was delivered and how to get a replacement shipped to me.  I ended up paying the first month's installment on the phone before I actually received it.  Although Amazon can be bad, but UPS can be worse because they consider a product to be delivered - even when they hand it off to the post office for last-mile delivery.  This happens quite a bit for many small items, and no notice is available on UPS's site to tell the recipient that they handed off the delivery to USPS. 

Shortly before the pandemic and during part of it, I was a customer of Freshly.  Their food was good, but their last mile delivery was terrible.  Out of 13 shipments, only 3 or 4 were delivered correctly.  My boxes were left behind entry doors where I couldn't see them, left in other doorways where no one cared about them, and in one case, left in front of a vacant apartment where the food was left to rot for a week. Although I got reimbursed for my losses, I got annoyed at the last mile delivery service they used - LaserShip.  Like many "Gig Economy" services, LaserShip bid out its deliveries to the lowest bidder, and this often meant that products were delivered incorrectly, if at all.  I'll bet that firms like this were the cause of Freshly's demise.

What in the world should we do as consumers?  For me, I'd report the products as missing as soon as they are marked as delivered and found not to be so.  Someone has to pay the cost for false deliveries and businesses have more clout than consumers to insure that their products get delivered properly.  So, make them pay the cost for the problems they created until these problems are fixed.

 

Sometimes, it's the little things that count

Sometimes, it's the little things that count.  As I reported in my prior blog, I had more unsatisfactory deliveries of my Freshly box than I had satisfactory deliveries.  All of the problems related to my Freshly deliveries were related to LaserShip and its Gig Economy business model - it is an Uber for last mile package delivery.  LaserShip is well known for poor quality delivery service, and the vast majority of its Yelp reviews only assign the company a single star - the lowest possible ranking.

So why do I start my first real post in this blog on something other than life as a Transgender person?  Well, not everything in a Transgender person's life focuses around gender identity, gender presentation, or gender manifestation.  Most of the time, our lives focus on the more mundane things such as commuting to work, buying groceries, getting together with family and friends, etc.  Once we start living our lives as our authentic selves, we continue to deal with our normal trials and tribulations in addition to the new headaches of people reaction to our authentic selves. Freshly delivery is one of those normal trials and tribulations - something I'd be dealing with whether or not I was transgender.

I had skipped a month's worth of Freshly deliveries, as I had a freezer full of both Freshly and Top Chef meals.  These meals needed to be eaten before any new meal deliveries were made.  Today was the first day in a month that a new Freshly delivery was expected at my door.  So I decided to check the Freshly site to track the delivery, and I found something that pleased me very much:

It looks like Freshly has finally decided to use another "Last Mile" delivery service to get their product to my apartment.  LaserShip would misdeliver my meals by roughly 12 noon.  CDL had not yet misdelivered my meals by noon, and I take this as a positive sign that CDL would rather its delivery men and women to get the job done right than to get the job done quickly.  However, only a track record of satisfactory deliveries will prove whether this is a positive development or not.  And today's delivery was a success - the Freshly box was found in front of my door at 3:00 pm, exactly where I wanted to find it.