Tales of U.P.S.’s Missing and Broken - New York Times
How often does a U.P.S. delivery go wrong? A spokeswoman for the company, Susan Rosenberg, said the information is proprietary. She added that the company moves 15.8 million packages a day, on average, which is obviously a gigantic number. It means that if U.P.S. botches just one-half of one-tenth of 1 percent of all deliveries — which to the Haggler’s ears sounds like an enviably low failure rate for anything — it bungles a little less than 8,000 deliveries a day.
THE point is that in a system as large as the one U.P.S. operates, passports are bound to vanish. Less excusable, it seems to the Haggler, is the way that its front-line customer service reps handled the immediate aftermath of this unfortunate episode. One was extremely helpful, but several others were pointlessly brusque.
Maybe this is about expectations. U.P.S. promises “to choreograph a ballet of infinite complexity.” But when the dance goes wrong, the system feels more like a mosh pit.
How often does a U.P.S. delivery go wrong? A spokeswoman for the company, Susan Rosenberg, said the information is proprietary. She added that the company moves 15.8 million packages a day, on average, which is obviously a gigantic number. It means that if U.P.S. botches just one-half of one-tenth of 1 percent of all deliveries — which to the Haggler’s ears sounds like an enviably low failure rate for anything — it bungles a little less than 8,000 deliveries a day.
THE point is that in a system as large as the one U.P.S. operates, passports are bound to vanish. Less excusable, it seems to the Haggler, is the way that its front-line customer service reps handled the immediate aftermath of this unfortunate episode. One was extremely helpful, but several others were pointlessly brusque.
Maybe this is about expectations. U.P.S. promises “to choreograph a ballet of infinite complexity.” But when the dance goes wrong, the system feels more like a mosh pit.
