They Killed my Chorus...:(

[speedbump]

Well, I got my new (used) Chorus I's after calling around for about an hour and a half yesteday. It seems they were struck by a meteor or something like that on the way here. I am VERY bummed out. One of the bases was in 6 peices, and I think they managed to get every single corner on both speakers. Hopefully, I will be reimbursed for them, and get to keep the speakers. Then it is major restoration time. It was hard enough getting the wife to let them in the living room, much less in this condition. Anybody else want to profess their undying hatred for FedEx or UPS? Share some horror stories so I don't feel so alone.

Speed

[Domain]

Ah the joys of UPS / Fedex. I'm still waiting for them to merge into a company called FedUP (seems to be the concenus of most of their customers).

I have had my fair share of problems with them in the past 6 months. Fedex left a new 17" FD Monitor on my porch in the middle of a thunderstorm (needless to say it didn't work so well). They also decided that a DVD player is best placed behind the back wheels of my car (luckily I didn't run over it).

UPS isn't any better...they delivered a package with some imported CD's to me, that look like it went through a meat grinder. I refuse to use them at all anymore, unless I have no other options.

http://www.hardocp.com]

And I don't even want to get started on the USPS

Domain

[Ray Garrison]

In all fairness to FedEx, we ship about 10,000 packages a month, all of which is fresh, perishable food products, and over 98% of the shipments arrive on time in good shape.

It's when things don't go right that truly amazingly bad stuff can happen. We had a buyer who received a whole tuna that had a hole punched COMPLETELY THROUGH THE FISH once. Looked like someone had fired an armor piercing 70mm shell at the box. You have any idea how hard it is to punch a whole clean through a tuna?

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Music is art

Audio is engineering

[dougdrake]

Ray - They probably melted a hole through it with buteric acid...

[Domain]

Ray,

Nope, never tried punching a hole through a tuna

And yes, for the most part Fedex does a decent job of delivering on time and in one peice. Considering the volume of packages they deal with, the horror stories make up a very small percentage.

However, with a little more "care" of how the handle packages the rate for "horror stories" would decrease sharply. I can't recall how many times i've watched one of their drivers beat, bang, mangle, and otherwise destroy delicated equipment/items. Of course their drivers are from my understanding are alloted a certain amount of time to deliver to their route, and pay is based upon meeting that time. Maybe thats the inherant problem?....

Even more horrifying is spending some time at a distribution center for a large retail chain (Best Buy, Circuit City, etc). One particular day, I watched a group of workers trying to "stuff" a pricey RPTV into a truck. First pushing, then kicking, then finally taking running starts to jam it into place (not to mention the 100+ other incidents all witnessed that day). After seeing that, I truly wonder how anything makes it to the destination in one peice

Make me wonder what perils my equipment might have been through before I purchased them

Domain

[PhilH]

After many years in retail, I realized there were a lot of airhead customers out there that would do anything to save a delivery charge.

One customer insisted on strapping his 35" Mitsubishi console TV to the top of his VW bug (I still don't know why the roof didn't cave in, must be that "round" shape they talk about in the current ads). Anyway, he didn't make it out of the parking lot...the first turn got the best of him as the car quickly turned on its side.

Another customer strapped a 50" Mitsu projection TV (the older style with all the wood veneer and the doors) to the back of his new Vette...the first corner for him produced a pile of veneer splinters and imploded guns when it slid off the back of the car.

I learned early on in that business to have those clowns sign off on their receipt a polite phrase that basically said they must be under the influence and we were not responsible...

PhilH

[EvilMinion]

Ahhh, the joys of UPS. They've destroyed many an item, no doubt, my neighbor's had several things trashed. Someone else I know had his Heresys UPS'd, they got mangled in transit, my neighbor's had a pair of Altec 288s thrashed, some Speakerlab Sixes lost a midrange horn.. the Sixes were boxed up really well, with "This side up!" marked all over it, as well as 'Fragile, electronic equipment". Guess what happens? The dropped the box on it's TOP. Hard enough to go through several inches of packing material and crunch the corner of the speaker cabinet itself, too. The mid-range horn, which is braced from below but not from the top, promptly shattered, and the heavy driver rattled around in the enclosure for who knows how long while it was on it's way, smashing the crossover. Tweeter fell out of the cabinet, too. Gotta love em.

As for USPS, I haven't had much bad luck with them, thankfully. I got a Kenwood KR-9050 receiver off ebay, and after much wrangling to get the moron to send it, it showed up USPS.. the mail man (poor guy) set it in the living room, and I knew it was packed horribly when I heard the solid thunk which was the receiver hitting the floor. Opened the box, 1" foamboard on top, 1" on bottom, NOTHING anywhere else, not even newspaper! If UPS had sent it, the knobs would have been stripped off the faceplate. Needless to say that guy got bad feedback.