FedEx’s SmartPost service does not live up to its name.
The idea is that they leverage the FedEx system to get a package most of the way, and then the US Postal Service to get it the “last mile” to the customer. So you get the best of both worlds, with FedEx’s expertise in covering large distances and the USPS’s specialized local knowledge….
…in theory. In practice, here’s what FedEx did with my shirt.woot that was ordered on Halloween (click to enlarge, and note that the timeline is in reverse order, with the most recent scans first):
Note in particular the fact that it somehow managed to get sent from Chino, CA to Denver, Colorado, to Sacramento, then BACK to Chino before it finally meandered its way to Santa Monica.
And this doesn’t even cover the two days it spent getting from the Post Office less than a mile from my house to my actual mailbox. It took two weeks to get the damn shirt here from a place just outside of Dallas.
I think this is even goofier than when I got my PowerBook in 2004, when FedEx managed to ship it from Anchorage to LAX via Indianapolis.
As someone who works in the industry, I can tell you that this is f’d up. Some serious stupid must have intervened on Nov. 5 in Chino. And I don’t understand how it could take 3 days for the package to get from Sacramento back to Chino.
My only thought is that the 11th was Veterans’ day, which probably managed to throw yet another monkey wrench on a pile of monkey wrenches.
But yeah…pretty nice job of incomprehensible rerouting.