Sunday, March 1, 2020

Less than Six Miles Apart




South San Francisco and Daly City are two neighboring cities in the San Francisco Peninsula. They are really close. Driving form one to another should take less than fifteen minutes.  



But that not how FedEx delivery service sees it. Here is my post about the small observational project which I would like to share with you, my friends.

I bought the book on Amazon. The book was used and I bought it from the SFGoodwill Amazon store. I work at Daly City and ordered delivery there. My assumption was that as far as SFGoodwill for sure means Goodwill of San Francisco even the cheapest delivery should not take long. Indeed pretty soon I got a delivery notification.  Item arrived at South San Francisco FedEx location. Based on that I expected delivery the next day. But,  alas, that not how it worked. The book was shipped to Sacramento, one hundred miles to the northeast either form South San Francisco or Daly City. After a couple of reroutes through the Sacramento FedEx locations, it was eventually moved to USPS and arrived at the destination. How that happened? The most probable explanation would be human error, right? One operator made a mistake and put the parcel into the wrong bin. It is good that eventually that was fixed.


Still, the human error idea needs to be verified. I looked into SFGoodwill Amazon store, found one more used book which had some value for me and ordered it, then tracked the package. Guess what?  The route was exactly the same: South San Francisco->Sacramento->Daly City.


Why it works that way?  Mystery. Sure SFGoodwill tries to find the cheapest service and probably FedEx Smartpost (which means the last leg of delivery is made by USPS) meets that expectation. But why FedEx ships it to Sacramento? Hard to tell. One thing I am sure Chuck Noland  (if you watched "Cast Away" you know what I am talking about) would make that delivery in a more efficient way.

Update 10/10/2020.
Recently I have bought used film SLR camera on e-Bay. Seller (on the East Coast) asked me is it OK to send it via FedEx. Of course I agreed and asked about tracking number. That gives me one more observation data point. The package traveled several days through the USA (looks like in the efficient way).  It arrived into Needles: small town in South California. From there it was moved to Stockton (almost San Francisco Bay Area). Guess what happened next? It moved to the north: Sacramento. And from there back to the south through the Fairfield straight to our house. Chuck Noland! Can you hear me!? You can do better!







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