As a UPS worker, and a person who has a fairly large number of packages go through my hands at my other employment, I am a ups customer as well. Both the shipper and receiver are our customers without either we would not exist. The company that sent the product my be the one paying us directly but the person receiving it has to be happy with us delivering it or we won't get another opportunity to deliver packages. In almost every instance they can request delivery by various methods from the company sending the package. Most people who regularly send and receive parcels know their delivery guys at least to some extent. This in my area includes the UPS man and the Postman the fed-ex guys change regularly to develop relationships with but in other areas this isn't the case. Steve the UPS guy at my office stops in every day he usually has 2 or 3 packages to deliver and on average a package a day to pick-up but the sending is less regular. He knows he is welcome to use the restroom, and grab coffee or water if he wants. Dan the mailman delivers to the door on weekdays instead of to the box at the end of the drive, the same applies. Dan delivers more envelops and picks up more but the total size and value is considerably less.
I personally have always gotten on a bit better with Steve than Dan but it is just personality things. Dan isn't outfitted to handle large numbers of moderately large parcels. That's why he isn't a fan of surepost. In a number of cases he is supposed to deliver to small mailboxes parcels that simply won't fit, in this more rural area that means he is leaving them a quarter mile or more away from the house next to the mailbox and road in some cases. He knows most of these people on at least a casual basis explain that at church, pto meetings, the firemans festival or other community gatherings. His vehicle isn't great for that either. Its more a case of not being able to do a good job than not wanting the work. The idea was that in low density area's they handle a bunch of envelops, and the occasional parcel instead lots of companies are using it for volume drop shipping which can be a bit extreme for the post office.
The local post office isn't set-up for the volume of parcels either and so we end up getting a decent number back to redeliver and we are constantly looking for ways to take volume off of them at my building. The other problem is we don't really have the driver hours/numbers nor routes/space to handle that either. With more and more e-commerce there is considerably more volume than there was 3 to 5 years ago as the economy is picking up this is becoming more and more so.
