Ordering from Amazon. Placed order w/”2-day shipping” option. Received notice of shipping w/in an hour. By noon, the item was listed as having shipped from a Fedex location about 70 miles from me. Next a.m.? Scanned in at a Fedex location 370 miles from me, though it’d travel more than 400 miles to get here from there via Fedex.
If I’d had direct access to the Amazon Marketplace seller, Imight well have simply driven up and gotten the product, but in that case, paying the extra $3 or $4 (I forget which) for next day delivery… nah, wouldn’t have speeded things up, since item was ordered on Friday. Would probably still have been Monday. And yes, I know Amazon said it’d be here by Tuesday, but it’ll be Monday, if my experiences w/Fedex are any guide.
Still… it will have traveled almost 800 miles to get here from 70 miles away. Something’s just wrong there. It’s almost as if it were coming via the Post Office.*
*Local mail–from one address here in town to another address in a town 4 miles away–travels almost 200 miles if sent via local postal “service”. No wonder the PO’s losing $$.
And yes, I know about arguments on efficient routing, economy of scale, etc., but in cases like these they’re mainly just excuses for MBAs to bloviate.
UPDATE: Well, Fedex decided to take a longer route back to me than I thought it would, given past experiences. It’ll have traveled almost 1,000 miles to make the 70 mile trip from its originating site to here. Tomorrow. I guess Amazon did know what it was talking about this time. *heh*
Yeh… Ordered something that arrived less than 20 miles from me on Friday yet won’t arrive till Wednesday if the tracking is to be believed. Thank goodness it isn’t shipping USPS or I might not see it till next Wednesday.
“Thank goodness it isn’t shipping USPS or I might not see it till next Wednesday.” If ever. *heh* I once had a business in a town 4 miles away pay an invoice by mail (as they had done several times over the years). It traveled over 100 miles to a sorting center in order to be sent from there to the wrong address… 200 more miles away (they’d addressed it correctly; they enclosed the unopened envelope that eventually got to me in another envelope and an employee who lived nearby HAND DELIVERED it). It was returned to the sorting center which then returned it to the originating PO which in turn returned it to the business, all marked up with various postmarks and stamps.
It started 4 miles away and it took almost 2 months to get to me.