Cynthia Kuhn

How to Get a Delivery Appointment

  1. Order item, which you need by Friday.
  2. Check online tracking service on Wednesday and see that it has already arrived in your city.
  3. Receive nothing on Wednesday.  Receive nothing on Thursday.
  4. Email customer service at store: explain that the item was in your city on Wednesday and was supposed to be delivered on Thursday but now it’s Friday and you haven’t heard anything.
  5. Receive no return customer service email.
  6. Call store customer service later in the day and explain everything again.
  7. Listen to customer service representative apologize and tell you that he’s filling out a form that will cause a specialist to call you tomorrow and fix the problem.
  8. Receive no specialist phone call, ever.
  9. Receive letter in mail from delivery company on Saturday, saying “We tried to contact you about your delivery but haven’t been able to get ahold of you.  Please call us during regular business hours, Monday through Friday.”
  10. Note that the letter is postmarked on Wednesday, which means they sent the letter the day that item arrived in town.  Without having left any messages on any of your voicemails, anywhere, at any time, even though they “haven’t been able to get ahold of you” and even though their phone number does not show up in any of your caller ID records.
  11. Receive email from store, saying that they’re writing to resolve the recent delivery problem as follows: you need to contact delivery company to set up an appointment.
  12. Receive follow-up email from store, asking if your problem has been solved.
  13. Email store, explaining that your problem has yet to be solved.  State that, at this point, the item will be arriving too late and you now wish to cancel the order, please.
  14. Receive no further contact from store.
  15. Wait until holiday weekend is over.
  16. Call delivery company first thing Tuesday morning.
  17. Explain that the item will be arriving too late and that you would like to refuse the item, please.
  18. Listen to delivery company representative tell you that he will take care of it, that the item will be returned.
  19. Go about your day, glad to be done with that rigamarole.
  20. Receive voice mail one hour later wherein the representative from the delivery company says, “We have a package to deliver to you!  Please call us to set up a time…”

Dear readers, please tell us about your delivery experiences…or any purchase that didn’t quite go the way you hoped it would!

47 thoughts on “How to Get a Delivery Appointment”

  1. OMG, this sounds so familiar.
    In late February, I ordered bookmarks for my new release. I figured I’d ordered well in advance and since shipping was so outrageous, I paid the cheaper, longer-delivery-time option. Order shipped March 2, arrived at the shipping facility 15 miles from my house on March 8. The tracking site said the delivery date was March 16. Eight days to travel 15 miles? The package never arrived. My first phone call to the printing company resulted in being told to give it a couple more days. I did. No package. My second call resulted in a follow-up email stating they’d determined the package was lost (ya think???) and were issuing a reprint. Another week passed (as had several opportunities to distribute the missing bookmarks) with no change in status on the website. A third phone call, and a trip down automated phone tree hell, revealed the order hadn’t been reprinted. It had been canceled. A FOURTH phone call (I was much less nice by now) finally produced action. They reprinted the order, shipped it, and it arrived THE NEXT DAY.
    The punch line is, last week the original order arrived.
    Anyone need a bookmark?

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    1. Yes… what she said! Well, ok- I didn’t purchase bookmarks for an upcoming release (I wish!) Things are so bad here in PA, they had the local USPS investigated. My parent were to receive a birthday card for my father from my brother, and his gang. The card was actually sent in time (For my brother, that’s an amazing achievement in and of itself!) Birthday was Feb. 4- Waiting on that card still. Sad thing is my brother added a gift card for Dad. Dad feels very guilty. For once, Dad has no reason to feel guilty… THIS time! 🙂

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    1. Dru, I think that’s the customer service rep’s way of pushing you off to someone else. They hope they aren’t the one who answers the phone the next time you call!

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    2. Marla, I think those directories are mostly fake, lol. Except for…new orders. They’re dying to talk to you live. I push yes to “If you’d like to place an order,” tell the sales person I’m SO sorry, I have no idea how I reached them, and ask them to direct me to the right place. They send me straight to a real customer service person b/c they can’t put you back into the automated system. Works like a charm, heh heh. I know. I am evil. But they started it.

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  4. Funny post, Cynthia. But not Funny.

    I ordered a book from B&N last year, one by David Leibovitz, a cocktail book. Was supppsed to be like a 5 day turn around from NY. Well, it got stuck UPS in my town. They said they gave it to USPS for delivery. USPS said they didn’t have it. Called B&N. They said give it another few days, they looked into it, and it was at USPS right down the street from me! Who told me they didn’t have it.
    I waited another week, and ordered one from an indie bookstore in Washington that had signed copies. Right after that, B&N sent a replacement, without letting me know first.
    Two weeks later, I get the replacement from B&N. The next day I get the signed one from Washington.
    6 weeks after the original order, I get the original book! Immediately called B&N to get a return label. One for me and one fir my daughter was plenty. I wouldn’t know what to do with the 3rd!

    But my fav is when I order Erin Condren Planner stuff. It comes FedEx.
    Leaves Austen warehouse.
    Goes to Louisiana.
    Sometimes goes to Atlanta next.
    North to Richmond Va. (mind you, that is just about 90 miles south of me)
    Then it passes over my to house to Pittsburgh Pa.
    South to Hagerstown Md.
    Then it goes over my house again, west to martinsburg, Wv.
    Then it finally hits me!
    I think the boxes travel more than us, and it is done on purpose so the boxes can compare travel notes!

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    1. Oh my gosh. (1) Then you had to go send it back after ALL that? Sigh.
      (2) Who comes up with the mailing routes? That seems so funny that it’s flying all around your house…and more than once!!!

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  5. Only one really bad delivery experience late last year. I bought some products online from Colorado which were shipped by DHL. Apparently they tried to deliver the box on Christmas Eve (I was home) but marked it as undeliverable, and sent it back to the company. I got no email or phone notification about the attempted delivery or return. I finally searched on DHL’s website in early January to find out what happens. So I contacted the Colorado company who refused to refund my purchase saying I have to submit a claim with DHL. And if I wanted to reorder the product, I could add a delivery protection charge of $15 to ensure reshipment if they I failed to get it. Really, an additional charge to ensure delivery? Uh, no thanks.

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  6. I’ve never had anything this bad.

    I once ordered tea from Amazon. The box never showed up. After navigating the phone tree. Amazon shipped out another box. The first box showed up the next day. I called Amazon to see if I should send it back and they said, “Nah, keep it.” I had tea for MONTHS!

    I recently had a FedEx shipment for Koda. I got the notification the package had been left on my porch, but when I looked – no package. I joked that if it was a porch pirate, the person would be disappointed when they found all the box held was doggy toothpaste. But I filed a missing package report with FedEx and it showed up the next day.

    But don’t get me started as I watch the tracking. “Why is it going west to go east?”

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  7. Oh, there’s the cookies I sent to NC for Christmas. It took 2 days to leave the post office and went 10 miles north and stayed there for 3 days! I could have walked them down there in the 9 days it took to get there! Needless to say I had to call them and tell them how to revive their freshness

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    2. You should have seen the “golden” pears my poor daughter sent us from a certain famous retailer in Oregon last year. They must have had quite a trip. They were so rotten and oozed in such an awful way that I had to take a pic of their crumpled, collapsed peardom. The things actually had faces, but they made a great calendar cover photo for 2020. The funny thing was, the retailer included a little card apologizing for the look of the fruit, b/c they’d been wind damaged and the area had suffered in the wildfires. But…these were just plain rotten, as in we could have had hard pear cider. We felt too guilty about the apparent state of their biz to complain, though, lol.

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  8. Shipping company’s customer service has gone downhill. I’ve had UPS hand off items to the USPS here in town for final delivery, and they sit there for a week before they finally arrive.

    But the worse was some books I ordered for my niece’s birthday this last summer. They were going to be gone on a road trip on her actual birthday, and I was getting her books, so I ordered them early. UPS handed them to their USPS office a few days before they left. They never arrived. They were gone for several weeks, and when they came back, my brother asked me if the books had ever been delivered. I started asking lots of questions. Barnes and Nobel sent replacement books. And then suddenly, the tracking on the original order started updating as well. The books were sitting two hours away, but they arrived a couple of days later, so my niece got two copies.

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      1. Worse than that. It was supposedly in town. Then a few weeks later, it was two hours away. So it moved further away instead of getting delivered.

        Fortunately, my brother and sister-in-law are raising my niece and nephew right (which isn’t a surprise) and she was very understanding. Of course, it helped that they were out of town having fun for most of the time.

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    2. I sent books for a friend to read before, during, and after her chemo treatments for breast cancer. They arrived in New Orleans – and sat someone where in USPS limbo for over SIX WEEKS. By the time they got to my friend, she was done with her treatment.

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      1. Mark, that is worse. In town and then it went away? Shaking my head. Well, glad that they were having fun and everyone understood.

        El, I hope your friend is doing well now!! That delivery time is unbelievable…

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  9. Ooof. I have so many stories like this (though most involve dealing with banks and other financial institutions), but if I relive the experiences by recounting them here, I may have to go back to bed and pull the covers up over my head…

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  10. Aw, I’m sorry, Cynthia. It’s aggravating waiting for packages — and maddening to look at the tracking route! (I sent a package to my mom that went through Oxford, Mississippi THREE times before making it to Memphis!

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  12. Oh GOSH! What a hassle!!

    One memorable delivery fiasco was an online order that was taking foreeeeeeever to arrive, despite reports of the package being in my town. A few phone calls later I discovered that a contracted delivery driver had become so overwhelmed with holiday packages that he had dropped them off at a warehouse where they sat for weeks until he could “get to them.” Someone finally took over and the packages were delivered to recipients.

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  13. I ordered deck flags for one of my kids from a wonderful, family-owned company I always use. They don’t even take credit card orders through their website. You call them up, and they are so nice. Well, they sent my order out the very next day via USPS (I happened to be watching those DeJoy hearings on Twitter at the time). They went from upstate NY to Jersey City, just over the river from NYC (their ultimate destination). Yay, I thought. That was fast. For some reason, they turned around and made 2 more stops in NJ, then headed down outside of DC, then back up the coast a bit and then to…Ohio. At that point, I gave up. Eventually, they arrived in Brooklyn, where they were delivered immediately. It was sort of like being on a plane in a holding pattern, and they don’t tell you but you can feel the plane turning around over and over.

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  14. What a story, Cyn. A make -you-laugh-and-cry tale. My most recent experience has been ordering something that would take “a few days” to deliver–and having that stretched out to weeks. Maybe they’re really extending the days on their calendar. (I’ve also had something “delivered” to my house, only to find nothing on the porch. Thankfully, no pirates. It made it here a day or so after.)

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    1. It seems worse when they say a few days and then it’s weeks…if they said weeks upfront, we’d be able adjust our expectations. We just want to know! 😂

      Glad that your disappearing delivery reappeared soon!

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