UPS, You’re on Notice!

My dear friend over at Supine Fever just wrote about a pretty nearly universal experience she’s had with UPS (link here):

I ordered something off of ebay, and it was due to arrive last Friday. The UPS guy only delivers to my area during the “After 5pm” timeslot, and I was at work Friday night, so I got home to a yellow slip saying they’d be back at the same time Monday.

So, I looked forward to my awesome new ebay It all weekend. Monday came, and I rushed home a few minutes early from my internship so that I could be home at 5pm on the dot, and sweet Mary mother of God, the yellow slip was on the door, saying they had come at 4:45. I was incensed. Incensed!

This is, without question, a total mess–the kind of customer service disaster that I think really hurts big businesses all the time (see also: cable companies, phone companies, cell phone companies, banks, etc). Why aren’t these corporations interested in doing the extra 5% of work it would require to make life better and easier for their customers? ESPECIALLY since doing so would make them stand up in stark contrast to their competition.

Anyway, my rant about big business in general put aside for the moment, I’ve got a pretty simple question specific to package delivery: why don’t these companies deliver on Saturdays? I don’t mean for an additional fee; I mean as a standard service for regular shipping. For the millions of people who work during the day on every weekday, the missed delivery experience is incredibly common and indescribably frustrating (although I’m trying). Even as a student with a relatively-flexible daily schedule, I’ve had many problems being home at the right time to receive packages, and over the summer when I was working a regular nine-to-five I ended up having to hoof it out to the FedEx Shipping Center after work just to get my package. Assuming that it’s not practical to simply add a day of delivery (although we know they have people working on Saturdays already, to deliver their Super Extra Priority Express packages), I propose that UPS simply adjust its schedule, bumping everything by one day: deliveries on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. No deliveries on Sunday or Monday. See what I just did there?

Now I know there are probably good reasons for the policy–it probably costs more to pay someone to work on weekends then on weekdays, the bulk of their packages are sent to and from businesses which are only open on weekdays, their infrastructure and flowcharts and brochures are all premised on weekday deliveries, etc. So let me offer an alternative plan that addresses one of those reasons and weakens the strength of another: why not have two types of regular shipping–commercial and noncommercial? Commercial packages are M-F; noncommercial are T-S (or M-S even!). Would this be more work for these companies, especially initially? Absolutely. Would I make sure that, whenever I had the choice, I would use the service that gives me the option of a Saturday delivery over the one that doesn’t? Absolutely. Would I pay an extra fifty cents or a dollar to know that I could schedule my package delivery for a day that I might be home? Absolutely.

There are at least a couple of smart people reading this. Tell me why I’m naive, stupid, misguided, or wrong for some reason I couldn’t possibly have known. Or, you know, forward this link to your great uncle Milton, VP at UPS.