Handle with Carelessness: 'Tis the Holiday Shipping Season

December 22, 2011 4:00 PM Text Size: A . A . A A white, FedEx delivery truck parks in front of a house, carrying the holiday present the homeowner has been waiting for: a giant, flat-screen Samsung computer monitor. Watching through his open front door, the recipient grins at the sight of the deliveryman. The package handler struggles to pull the glossy box out of the van, and then staggers up to the property's 6-foot-tall iron fence. But instead of reaching for the bell to alert anyone that he's there, he casually lifts the fragile computer monitor above his head and chucks it over the fence. The monitor is destroyed.

Video of this incident was caught on a home security camera last week and the 21-second clip has now been viewed more than 4 million times on YouTube. FedEx's Senior VP of U.S. Operations, Matthew Thornton, III, has since recorded a public apology, saying he was "upset and embarrassed" by the incident.

"This goes directly against all FedEx values; it's just who we are," he says. "While this delivery did not live up to that high standard, we are already using it as a learning opportunity. We have shared the video internally as a reminder that every single package is precious cargo to you, our customers."

Thornton says the customer accepted the company's apology?and presumably a replacement monitor?and is satisfied. (The FedEx employee has been taken off of delivery rounds.)

That's fine, but a similar shipping catastrophe happened to PopMech a few years ago when we shipped a custom-built gaming PC to a sweepstakes winner. It showed up in pieces. So we wanted to know just how high the delivery standards of FedEx, along with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and UPS, truly are. Senior tech editor Glenn Derene stuffed a box with sensors and data loggers and sent it on an epic cross-country journey with all three carriers to find out who was the kindest to our packages.

USPS was the gentlest, with a per-trip average of 0.5 acceleration spikes over 6 g's, but UPS actually flipped the packages over the least. FedEx was best at keeping the box at a stable temperature. However, when we marked the boxes "Fragile," all three carriers gave it above-average bruising. Read all of our findings here.

And check out these packing tips to ensure that your presents arrive in one piece, just in case the handling isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/handle-with-carelessness-tis-the-holiday-shipping-season-6622893?src=rss

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