Delivery Woes Leave Customers Worried About Mailed Christmas Gifts
NORTH TEXAS (CBS 11 NEWS) - While North Texas weather was glorious on Wednesday, the ice storm nearly two weeks ago seems to be wreaking continued havoc on folks trying to send Christmas gifts, especially via the United Parcel Service (UPS.)
There are three major DFW operations for UPS, with the biggest being the inter-modal hub in Mesquite. The location there connects parcels in trains with semis and local trucks. Employees there are busy working overtime to address a national backlog from the ice storm.
Randy Hendricks is a customer caught up in that backlog. He told CBS 11 News the tracking trail for a computer being delivered to him from California goes cold somewhere in Los Angeles. Pointing to his tracking number he said, "The tracking scan that is on this package is Friday the 13th at 7:50 a.m. and here it is five days later and no one knows where the package is."
Hendricks showed CBS 11 that information at one o'clock on Wednesday. Then around 5 p.m. his computer was finally delivered, although Hendricks says there is still no record of it in the UPS system.
UPS delivery woes aren't limited to North Texas; the company is also making international. Joanna Prentice was in Costa Rica during the ice storm but says she heard about delivery issues, and now will not ship her Christmas packages won't ship via UPS. "I'm not going to try it [UPS] because I heard the same news when I got back from Costa Rica. I want to make sure the packages get where they need to go."
CBS 11 also received complaints about the performance of other delivery services. There were complaints about FedEx, too. But Wednesday that carrier said operations have stabilized and are back to normal.
Waseem Ahmad is not so sure. "I have been facing as lot of these issues," he said. Ahmad contracts with the big carriers from his shipping store in Allen. He insists he hears mostly about problems with UPS and the U.S. Post Office. "Mainly issues on the deliveries. It's not being done on time."
Postal Service spokesman McKinney Boyd had a different perspective when looking at the big picture. "We are proud to say deliveries are moving quite well."
USPS officials said their system returned to normal last week, nationally and locally. "[There are] no problems that we are experiencing with the Postal Service," Boyd said. "Again, we have a tremendous amount of volume, more than 7,000,000 pieces of mail over the last two days."
UPS admits it has a problem with the storm's backlog, but confirmed it handled 29,000,000 parcels worldwide on Monday – the most this season. Officials with the company say they plan to keep people and equipment working overtime until the backlog is gone.
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